What keeps you awake at night?

Our perennial question is designed to give a snapshot of concerns, where responders rate their top three concerns. These are the results:

Verbatims

When members gave verbatim answers to other concerns they ranged from the personal to an international perspective, taking in newer technologies and ethical issues on the way.

On ethics, the issues of discrimination and diversity and inclusion were cited, and one member simply wrote they experienced a ‘dysfunctional organisation.’

On the tech itself, neuromorphic technologies were mentioned, along with a ‘lack of IT supply chain transparency and control including lack of effective contractual control over previously outsourced IT services (on-premises and cloud).’

From the customer perspective, the availability of digital services, pricing and ensuring digital accessibility were listed.

A lot of the additional issues came under the general heading of business concerns. These included ‘budgets not realistic to recruit’, and ‘bureaucracy and inadequate technical knowledge of decision makers’.

Effective supply chains that can reliably deliver the needed changes to technology platforms, regulatory compliance, resilience, and the requirements of the Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) were also raised.

Some issues on the changing market landscape were also mentioned, for example, the contract market struggles caused by IR35. One member wrote: ‘Digital transformation in small businesses appears to be a complicated problem — given the cost of implementation and maintaining the IT infrastructure with a minimal revenue, small businesses are reluctant to undertake the digital transformation and come up with more problems, without a clear understanding of the benefits, where some are also using the absence of an IT system to evade taxation and engage in other illegal activities.’

Alongside the more traditional business concerns, cultural elements also came in. One member sees a problem with ‘faddism and the failure to understand core requirements.’ Another cites an ‘inability to change due to "old-fashioned" IT thinking’ and another ‘lack of a coherent end-to-end vision from leadership.’

On that wider perspective? ‘Genocidal wars around the world’, ‘how we reduce the impact of IT on the planet’, and ‘uncertain international stability’ were cited.

View comparison

For ‘What keeps you up at night?’ we also like to see the differences between the answers of IT leaders and IT professionals. The top two rated concerns are the same as last year:

• Cybersecurity/resilience 36% (leaders) and 27% (professionals)
• AI 13% (leaders) and 21% (professionals)

For IT professionals AI attracted 17% last year, so this concern appears to have increased.

Last year, leaders rated lack of resources as their third concern, and this was still the case for 2025. For IT professionals, the pace of change was in third place last year, but has been matched by lack of resources for this year.

Also of note is that access to skilled staff is an issue for IT leaders — with 37% rating this in their top three things that keep them awake at night.

Interestingly, net-zero policies and sustainability concerns are not in the top three things that keep them awake for 88% of professionals or 92% of IT leaders. This may indicate an understandable focus on keeping the business lights on, or it could be that this needs further raising in the collective awareness. This would certainly benefit from more analysis in 2025.