Published on the 15/09/2022 | Written by Heather Wright

Highy hyped, highly visible – and great for your brand… 

CIOs need to ‘experiment with the highly visible, highly hyped’ as they attempt to get Australian and New Zealand companies back to sustainable growth in the face of a deprioritisation of growth by CEOs.

At least, that was one piece of advice attendees at the Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo on the Gold Coast heard this week. 

“Use the force multipliers that are the best fit for your enterprise.”

The comment, made by Tina Nunno, Gartner distinguished VP analyst, was met with nervous laughter from the assembled tech leaders, when she added ‘doesn’t that sound like fun?’

To those assembled, it clearly didn’t.

But Nunno says it’s one of four ‘force multipliers’ – alongside creating an IT enabled enterprise brand, taking friction out of work and investing aggressively in AI augmentation – to revolutionise work and help address talent shortages and ultimately help drive sustainable growth.

She highlighted the importance of creating tech enabled brands and suggested going one step further.

“What if you had a high tech enabled brand? A reputation that your organisation takes risks, likes to innovate, likes to take chances and try new things.

“If you want this brand – if you need this brand – then try highly hyped technologies.

“Organisations that experiment and innovate during times of economic uncertainty stand out from the pack and drive growth. Employees now highly value and want to increase their digital skills, they’re ready to absorb more advanced tech, so let’s use that.”

Nunno went on to note that for many companies hybrid work isn’t really working and suggested trying ‘something different and emergent and a bit risky’ – like the intraverse, the next-generation internet providing a virtual office incorporating metaverse technologies, to bring employees together to collaborate, connect and innovate.

While employees might not like intraverse, if you’re highly visible about it, Nunno argued, your employees will know you tried – and the company’s value increases. 

“Your willingness to experiment is sending a powerful message about you and your organisation. But if you’re not visible about your risk-taking there is no brand payout.

“Strategically experiment with the highly hyped when it might enhance your brand. Use low-cost, low-risk approaches, create high visibility around your experimentation to help enhance your leadership brand. 

“As CIOs you have the power to revolutionise work. Use the force multipliers that are the best fit for your enterprise.”

Nunno’s call for CIOs to revolutionise work was one segment of a bigger call to arms for CIOs with Gartner executives imploring local technology leaders to step up to the plate and ‘make the difference’ as traditonal ways of growing and scaling are no longer sustainable in the face of inflationary pressures, economic uncertainty and talent crunches. 

“CEOs are more pessimistic,” Adrian Leow, Gartner VP analyst, says. “They’re deprioritising growth due to a lack of confidence they can make supply meet demand in this environment. 

“The growth curve has dropped but digital leadership can bend the curve.”

Digital leaders expect revenue growth rates to be three times higher than those with low digital maturity, and Leow says there are investments that give multiple business benefits over a period of time. 

It’s those ‘force multipliers’ across revolutionising work, responsible investment and resilient cybersecurity, that the Gartner team were pushing. 

Leow’s push for responsible investment – a ‘two for one’ strategy for achieving sustainable growth and returns, saw him pushing the force multipliers of investing in connected infrastructure, digitally reducing energy usage and engineering autonomous sourcing.

On the cybersecurity resilience, Kristian Steenstrup, Gartner distinguished VP analyst, highlighted managing your attack surface, protecting business outcomes and using protection-level agreements tied to business priorities. 

“It’s about implementing resilient cybersecurity to deliver sustainable protection that protects business outcomes without constraining them,” Steenstrup says.

“We can’t execute if our systems are down. We can’t attract employees or customers if we have a brand that can’t be trusted.”

But he was blunt that protection will never be 100 percent – just as retail can’t 100 percent protect against shoplifting and manufacturers can’t attain zero defects in production. 

He says there is rising interest in technologies like software composition analysis, which provides visibility into software supply chain vulnerabilities.

External attack surface management to orchestrate all actions and investments across the software supply chain, and threat intelligence to prioritise and fix vulnerabilities being exploited, are also options.

“While many of these technologies are early in the hype cycle the time to invest is now.

“To address your software supply chain risks invest in attack surface management, software composition analysis and threat analysis.”

Protecting business outcomes requires prioritising the most important business outcomes and the most critical business dependencies.

“Do this by identifying the dependencies that have a direct line of sight to your most important mission outcomes.”

Ensuring protection level agreements are tied to business priorities rounded out his three force multipliers, with Steenstrup noting c-level peers don’t care how technology works, but they care deeply about protection levels and costs.

“Through protection level agreements they can chose how much protection they want and how much they want to spend.”

He cites the example of patching. If a company takes 45 days to patch a system they’re at risk for 45 days.

“You can make an agreement with your c-suite peers to invest $1 million and get down to 30 day patching. This is what we call a protection level agreement. It’s a very powerful construct.”

If any attendees were feeling their company’s were a little behind the eight-ball, Andy Rowsell-Jones had some good news for them:  We’re no where near as digitally advanced as we might like to think.

Gartner’s Digital Execution Scorecard, which benchmarked more than 1000 enterprises on how digital they were, shows some surprisingly low digitisation: Just five percent of applications used AI/ML.Cloud based applications fared better at 30 percent – but still likely well below the perception of man in the industry. Agile too, scored 30 percent. 

“You may have come in thinking you’re a long way behind because you’re only just beginning to use AI or cloud, well, you’re in good company. It’s not universal, no where near it yet.”