From Supply Chains To Blockchain, A Tough Road Ahead For CIOs

An excerpt from the Forbes CIO newsletter. To get it to your inbox, click here.

From managing supply chains to leveraging blockchain, CIOs face some challenging decisions in 2023.

Let’s start with China. While the dramatic shift in President Xi Jinping’s zero-Covid policy carries some risks, the easing of restrictions has been largely welcomed by investors and companies that operate there. But brace yourself for unforeseen consequences. Though unpopular, strict lockdowns have been effective in curbing Covid, keeping the world’s most populous country off the WHO’s top ten list for Covid-related casualties. As Forbes senior contributor and Harvard professor Willy Shih points out, China’s “factory city” model leaves the country especially vulnerable to contagion. Moreover, much of the population is unvaccinated—and studies of Chinese vaccines such as Sinovac, published in The Lancet, have found them to be less effective than mRNA vaccines (such as Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech). With less reporting of cases in China, it might be hard to tell how the pandemic will play out.

What we do know is that many companies are accelerating a push to diversify their supply chains beyond China. If talent shortages, rising costs and political pressure from Washington weren’t enough, violent protests and labor disputes at the world’s biggest iPhone plant last month drove home the value of supplier diversity. Simon Lin, chairman of Taiwan-based iPhone supplier Wistron notes that it won’t be fast or easy, but he told Forbes that the company already has what he calls “the ‘first-phase preparation’ of a global footprint in different stages of readiness.”

Few understand the complexities of doing business in or with mainland partners like those working in enterprise tech. There are the concerns about spying that prompted Washington to ban Chinese telecom and video surveillance equipment. (The U.S. formally dismissed criminal charges again Huawei CFO Meng Wangzhou last week but the Senate also introduced a bipartisan bill to bar Huawei from accessing U.S. banks.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) also announced bipartisan legislation Tuesday to ban TikTok in the U.S., citing concerns that the app could be used to spy on Americans. That’s in addition to statewide bans. To understand the fear that’s driving these decisions, look at the investigative coverage that Emily Baker-White and others are doing here.

Finally, of course, we are keeping our eyes on the latest drama around FTX cofounder Sam Bankman-Fried and his enigmatic CTO Gary Wang. We’ve long emphasized the differences between crypto currencies and the broad, transformative effect of the blockchain technologies on which they’re based. But the ripple effects of FTX could dampen enthusiasm for the blockchain distributed ledger technology on which it’s based.

But the real cautionary tale for enterprise tech leaders comes from the debacle of the Australia Securities Exchange (ASX), which has killed its six-year project to move much of its workflow to a shared, distributed ledger similar to the blockchain. The goal was to make the market more efficient by creating a single source of truth around equity ownership. Easier said than done, it turns out. But the lessons learned will no doubt pave the way for that dream to be realized in other contexts.