The Society for Information Management just published their list of the top concerns for CIOs in 2016. 785 organizations were polled, and here are the top 10 concerns that IT leaders came up with:

1. Alignment of IT with the Business
2. Security and Privacy
3. Speed of IT Delivery and Time-to-Market
4. Innovation
5. Business Productivity and Efficiency
6. IT Value Proposition to the Business
7. IT Agility and Flexibility
8. IT Cost Reduction and Controls
9. Business Agility and Flexibility
10. Business Cost Reduction and Controls

So, to proactively address these concerns, what should a CIO do? Many of these top concerns can be addressed utilizing outsourced, “As a Service” solutions. There are many benefits that come with utilizing these solutions, but what it mostly comes down to is this: a CIO won’t need to worry about unimportant, commodity-level topics like servers, data centers, and software releases, and can instead focus more of their time on big business issues such as mobility, big data, security, and, of course, increasing revenue. This eliminates a lot of the top concerns that make it on this list year after year. Instead, we should be concerned that a lot of these commodity-level topics are actually making it onto this list – Clearly CIOs should be open to new marketplace solutions.

To start, the issue of Speed of IT Delivery and Time-to-Market can be easily solved utilizing outsourced cloud solutions. Cloud efficiencies should be taken advantage of, including IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS, because they dramatically shorten development and deployment lifecycles, and to also address the concern of IT Cost Reduction and Controls, they also exponentially reduce costs. This takes a lot of the pressures off of a CIO.

IT Agility and Flexibility also begins and ends with cloud delivery and intelligent outsourcing. Speaking of intelligent outsourcing, Innovation can be achieved by outsourcing to a team of visionaries, consultants, and subject-matter experts.

So why are these same concerns making it on the list year after year for IT executives? The cloud and outsourcing “As a Service” solutions aren’t new ideas – they’ve been around the IT industry for years. The problem is, companies aren’t taking the necessary steps to exploit these incredible business technology efficiencies and trends that have been evolving over the years. Concerns over IT Cost Reduction, Agility and Flexibility, Speed of Delivery and Time-to-Market, and even Innovation, can be properly and effectively addressed and eliminated using intelligent outsourcing and cloud delivery. In turn, these benefits will trickle down and can work toward properly addressing and solving the other concerns that IT executives possess. Now, it’s time for CIOs to start worrying more about big business issues, like business technology integration. CIOs, it’s time to let your cloud providers and consultants address these concerns, so you can move on to bigger and better things for your organization.