By Freya Purnell
Senior business leaders globally believe that risk in the business environment is currently lower, and have a bullish attitude toward technology-related business growth in 2014 and 2015, according to the 2014 Gartner CEO and Senior Executive Survey.
“Growth is very clearly king in this year’s business priorities with 33 percent of respondents naming growth as their top priority,” said Mark Raskino, vice president and Gartner Fellow. “In 2014 growth almost equals the sum of the next three issues on the list of top strategic business priorities. The next step will be for CEOs and CIOs to work together to match the use of modern technologies to the specific kind of growth that the business is trying to win.”
Almost half of the IT-related priorities that respondents gave specifically mentioned digital, online or modern technologies of the post e-business era, such as social, cloud and mobile.
Gartner also asked respondents about their most important technology-enabled capability investments over the next five years. With most of the mentions about technologies associated with front office/revenue-winning capabilities such as sales and marketing, the responses made it clear that CEOs’ minds were set on applying technology for growth, rather than internal cost and efficiency.
Gartner also noted strong interest in basing business operation in the cloud and in using data-driven decision-making via business analytics, big data and data science. Back-office or process-centric applications such as business process outsourcing, dynamic business process management and electronic service enablement were much further down the list of priorities.
Raskino said these results show that business leaders are lagging behind in their understanding of digital business.
“One of the most important things the CIO can do over the next year to two is close the very big gap in understanding, by working on education for the board, executives, senior and middle management layers. A decade of believing that IT was a commodity function, to be mostly outsourced, has left many business leaders in a position of relative weakness,” Raskino said.
“Their vision and knowledge of the changes that technology makes possible are not strong enough. Their abilities in making deep, technology-enabled business change happen are not well practiced.”
