Industry

Fashion

Date

Insights

Failure or future: why CIOs must lead the way to digitalization

Discover why you are the key to your company’s success.

Title Failure or Future: Why CIOs must Lead the Way to Digitalization

Using the right digitization software and tools

In the fashion world, where designers and famous brands star on the stage, CIOs and their IT teams have largely been active behind the scenes, responsible for automating the back office operations that enabled fashion stars to shine. Given today’s IT-driven fashion environment, there’s no better time than now for CIOs to lead by providing their companies with a vision for the future through technology. They can help their companies succeed by taking the lead, being proactive and carrying a torch for change. Because they are the ones who can lead their company to digitalization. 

Leading in the golden age of e-commerce and omni-channel retail

The rise of e-commerce and omni-channel retail have made fashion companies more IT and data-reliant today, resulting in heavy investments in big, sophisticated solutions and equipment.  Fashion professionals are facing these common problems due to the surge in the number of multiple, disparate IT systems that have been implemented over the past few years: 

  • Inadequate and outdated applications 
  • Lack of data security  
  • Disorganized data 
  • Complicated and non-intuitive systems that require long onboarding processes  

CIOs have to find a way to simplify and connect all IT systems together to ensure that all teams involved in the design-to-production process are collaborating efficiently.   

 

This e-guide will show you how, with the right digitization software and tools, CIOs can help fashion companies: 

  • Improve and accelerate teamwork 
  • Increase flexibility to allow more time and space for creativity 
  • Establish a single source of truth 
  • Connect all supply-chain actors in the production line 

Download our e-guide for more insight into how cios can provide their companies with a vision for the future

How CIOs should lead companies to success with digitalization ?

CIOs come under greater pressure to accommodate new brands… facilitate e-commerce… communicate to broader and more diverse markets… and fulfill manufacturing processes through more efficient digital tools, a reactive posture is no longer acceptable. And in fact, cannot bring the virtues of today’s best technologies to your business. In an ever more complex business and technology environment, true CIO leadership is more important than ever. We believe that simply maintaining the status quo – continuing to react to executive requests for technology services – is no longer a path to sucess. Instead, the same challenges that vex fashion enterprises can become extraordinary opportunities for growth – if CIOs are prepared to meet their fellow executives with illuminating insight, foresight, and most importantly, leadership.

The stakes are high. A large part of the industry’s growth comes from acquisition strategies that require the integration of multiple legacy systems. Like other industries, fashion struggles to make sense of Big Data, machine learning, AI, and IoT, forcing IT to accommodate exponentially greater streams of ever more diverse structured and unstructured data. To address these concerns and more, CIOs must embrace new technology – often without a clear vision of which tools are most appropriate, and at what scale.

The lead is yours to take

Ten years ago, it was reasonable to think of IT as merely an enabler to the fashion industry, a more efficient way of supporting routine operations. But as our paper points out, the latest technologies – and the ones we can anticipate just around the corner – can do more than enable: they can materially improve a fashion business in every dimension, from design inspiration to online retail.