2023 STATE OF IT REPORT 20 key IT statistics and trends found that every CIO should know: 1. 84% of IT leaders say their departments need to better address changing customer expectations. 2. 82% of IT leaders say their departments need to better demonstrate business value. 3. 62% of IT leaders have trouble keeping up with demands from the business.  4. Only 35% of IT leaders say their performance metrics are completely aligned with those of other departments. The five IT metrics are: 1. project ROI, 2. project speed, 3. customer satisfaction/experience, 4. employee satisfaction/experience, and 5. sustainability.  5. According to McKinsey, 50% of organizations used AI in 2022. IDC is forecasting global AI spend to increase a staggering 26.9% in 2023 alone. A recent survey of customer service professionals found adoption of AI had risen by 88% between 2020 and 2022. 6. Customer Service leads AI use cases with organizations with AI using it in the following ways: service operations optimization (24%), new AI-based products (20%), customer service analytics (19%), customer segmentation (19%), AI-based product enhancements (19%), customer acquisition and lead generation (17%), contact center automation (16%), and product feature optimizations (16%).  7. 86% of IT leaders believe generative AI will have a prominent role it their organization in the near future. Yet 64% of IT leaders are concerned about the ethics of generative AI, and 62% are concerned about its impacts on their careers. 8. IT leaders, concerns around generative AI included security risks (79%), bias (73%), and its carbon footprint (71%). 9. 87% of IT leaders expect more investment in automation at their organizations over the next 18 months. 10. IT departments using automation report an average of 1.9 hours saved per week per employee. 11. The top benefits of automation are: operational efficiency (56%), employee productivity (52%), customer satisfaction (49%), job satisfaction (44%), decreased costs (39%), more focus on high-value work (39%), competitive differentiation (36%), ability to scale (35%), and fewer support tickets (26%). 12. Only 42% of IT leaders are completely satisfied with the state of their organization's process automation. 13. IT departments are struggling to keep up with soaring demand for application development, with only about one-quarter (26%) of them able to support all requests. 14. In pursuit of more efficient development, low-code and no-code tools are now commonplace, with 77% of IT departments using them. 15. 46% of IT departments have composable design strategies now, and an additional 43% have plans to implement them within 18 months. 16. The estimated number of applications across a typical enterprise (2021: 843, 2022: 976, and 2023: 1,061) has soared by 26% in just two years as organizations strive to meet rising standards for real-time, highly-personalized digital experiences. 17. Considering that 72% of customer interactions are now digital, the experiences customers and employees expect often depend on reconciling, connecting, and harmonizing data from various sources. 18. Today, 88% of IT leaders view system/application integration as critical for both customer and employee experiences. 19. Enterprise IT leaders estimate spending an average of $4.7M per year on custom integration efforts -- a whopping 31% higher than their estimate of $3.6M in 2022. 20. 80% of IT leaders say integration challenges slow down digital transformation initiatives. @salesforce @zdnet zdnet.com/article/state-of-i…