According to Gartner, CEOs have been deprioritizing growth. In 2020, 56% prioritized growth as a key success metric. Next year in 2022-2023, this figure drops to 39%.

There are many reasons for this decline in growth ambitions, including a lack of talent, limited access to raw materials and supply chain issues. Sustainable growth is a vehicle that can help reverse this trend. It can be delivered using technology to ensure repeatable, ethical and environmental growth in a financially viable way.

During the opening keynote the analysts highlighted three ways to achieve sustainable growth through technology: revolutionary work, responsible investments and resilient cybersecurity.

Revolutionizing work to retain and attract talent

The technology industry is in the midst of a talent crisis. But organizations can address this head on and retain talent by embracing technology to produce better tools and boost employee engagement. IT is the epicenter of the talent solution.

According to Gartner, workers who have a good tech or enterprise app user experience in their company are 2x more likely to stay than those who have a bad experience.

The importance of good tech experiences goes beyond improving levels of frustration.

Organizations can use tech to liberate the workforce and help them participate in a more interesting and cutting-edge environment.

Effective technology solutions, like heavy investment AI augmentation, can take the friction out of work, foster a culture of impact and enable the workforce to perform in a sustainable manner.

“CIOs are at the epicenter of the talent crisis, with scarce technology skills in high demand globally. But CIOs are also at the epicenter of the solution, providing the technology and tools to help transform the way enterprises do work,” said Mary Mesaglio, Managing VP, Gartner Research & Advisory.

Looking to the future, any workforce should be AI-enabled, organizations should invest in tech during times of downturn and digital should be placed at the epicenter of corporate culture.

To attract talent and drive engagement, organizations should also invest in next-gen, highly visible and highly hyped technologies like the metaverse and publicly experiment with new technologies.

Responsible investment

Responsible investment delivers financial and sustainability outcomes at the same time. Gartner describes this as a virtuous cycle or a two for one strategy that helps organizations achieve sustainable growth and returns.

“All CIOs have the potential to help their enterprises reduce the energy consumption of their IT operations, and energy costs for the enterprise as a whole,” said Daniel Sanchez Reina, VP Analyst, Gartner Research & Advisory.

According to the World Economic Forum, technology could help reduce global emissions by 10%.

To achieve this, these investments should be focused on two areas: intelligent connected infrastructure and autonomous sourcing.

Investment in both will help organizations digitally reduce energy usage.

Intelligent connected infrastructure optimizes infrastructure resource planning through machine learning and automation. This helps save millions of management hours and is key to reduce an organization’s environmental impact, while improving safety, performance and personal experience when interacting with services or assets.

Autonomous sourcing gives organizations access to a wider range of suppliers. This reduces cost and reduces the time to sign requests for proposals (RFPs).

By embracing an Energy Management and Optimization System (EMOS), organizations can also make energy decisions in real-time by investing in state-of-the-art machinery and technology solutions with long lifecycles to help create responsible products with reduced resources.

Resilient cybersecurity

It’s been said many times before and boards are now listening. It’s time to treat cybersecurity as a business issue.

Cybersecurity is a significant challenge that threatens a company’s finances and reputation. To achieve sustainable growth, a resilient security strategy is needed.

External attack or threat management is a solution that aligns protection to a business’ outcomes.

It’s time to identify cyberattacks as a business risk, quantify that risk and begin investing in outcomes. Organizations should use protection level agreements that are tied to business outcomes or objectives.

“CIOs cannot protect the organization entirely. No more than retail will eliminate shoplifting, or government agencies will reduce fraud to zero. But business-focused cybersecurity investments can significantly improve protection levels,” said Ed Gabrys, Managing VP, Gartner Research & Advisory.

2022 Gartner Opening Keynote: Make the Difference, Mary Mesaglio, Daniel Sanchez Reina, Ed Gabrys

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