Where Next: Technology leadership in a world disrupted

Where we work, where we consume goods and services, where innovation happens, where business value is generated … it all has changed. This raises the question "where next?" During the opening keynote of Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2021 EMEA, which is held virtually from November 8 to 11, analysts shared how CIOs and technology executives should lead when their frame of reference, or the "where" of everything, has shifted and disruption and uncertainty continue. This means that tech leaders must reach beyond what they know today and completely rethink the roles of people, data and technology when creating value for tomorrow.

Gartner identifies three key focus areas for CIOs to drive value

To accelerate value creation, CIOs and IT executives should focus on three key areas, according to Gartner: leading from anywhere, nurturing connections and reaching beyond.

Opening the keynote, Mbula Schoen, Senior Research Director at Gartner, said that as organizations continue to emerge from the disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic, CIOs and IT executives will need to seek to generate value in fundamentally new ways.

CIOs and IT executives should focus on leading anywhere by ensuring enterprise and talent readiness; nurture connections to ensure ecosystem readiness; and reach beyond by using technology and society readiness.

Leading and empowering anywhere

To explain how leaders need to shift their thinking about the where and when of work, Mbula Schoen used the ongoing return to the office debate and the Great Resignation phenomenon. She said Gartner research showed that 14% of staff members wanted to be back in the office full-time while 19% preferred to be remote full-time. "Both groups are in the minority, compared to the larger group that wants 'radical flexibility at scale' and the ability to work at the best place at any given time", she said. "Moving from on site to remote is not the destination. It's a starting place for CIOs to embrace radical flexibility and implement news ways of working, with supporting technology, across the enterprise", she added.

To attract and retain the necessary IT talent, Gartner recommends CIOs do three things:

Design a human-centric workplace: A human-centric workplace is a workplace where purpose, innovation and performance thrive. It is about employees’ full life experience, not just about location and the supporting technology. It focuses on what impacts their ability to perform, to be productive and to give the discretionary efforts expected, regardless of where they are. A recent Gartner survey of 2,410 hybrid and remote knowledge workers showed that with a human-centric workplace, worker fatigue is reduced by 44%, intent to stay increased by 45% and employee performance increased by 28%. Mbula Schoen took the example of Dropbox – who give choice to employees while promoting virtual first – to illustrate her points.

Harness the power of business technologists: Gartner research shows that currently 41% of employees - commonly regarded as shadow IT - identify themselves as business technologists, meaning they report outside of IT departments and create technology or analytics capabilities for internal or external business use. Organizations that successfully enable business technologists and integrate them into "fusion teams" together with IT staff are 2.6 times more likely to accelerate digital business outcomes than organizations that do not empower business technologists. Model Ops and Machine Learning Ops (MLOps) teams are two examples of this approach.

Build an internal talent marketplace: Internal talent marketplace platforms use AI and skills data to support enterprise demand for reskilling and flexibility in connecting workers to roles and short-term assignments. These marketplaces essentially identify what talent exists in the enterprise, what the talent knows, what they have worked on, and with whom. Thus, offering access to a broader talent pool and more growth and development opportunities for employees.

"Where we work, where technology leadership comes from and where IT is produced has shifted", said Mbula Schoen. "CIOs and IT executives must capitalize on changes around the future of work to propel their teams and their enterprises forward".

Nurturing connections everywhere

Where innovation happens has changed - across vendor partners, ecosystems and even customers - which impacts where business value is generated. "We are now in the position to go further and solve world-class problems, but CIOs cannot do this alone. Sometimes they will need a good friend, sometimes a whole village", said Hung LeHong, Distinguished Research Vice President and Gartner Fellow. "CIOs need to take the acceleration in digital investments caused by the pandemic to pursue the next level of outcomes in healthcare, education, industry, and public and commercial life. This will require new ways of partnering and building platforms that support ecosystems to solve world-class problems together. CIOs will need to get really good at building partnerships of all types", he insisted.

Hung LeHong used the example of AI-powered hospital waiting rooms and crop spraying as two examples of how partnerships can change the traditional approach to business. Drones used with AI allow farmers to limit the use of pesticides just as AI applied to telemedicine enables hospitals to reorganize the way their waiting rooms are working.

"How will you nurture your connections with partners everywhere?", asked Hung LeHong. "Focus on three types of connections: one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many", he answered.

A one-to-one connection can be taken to the next level and become a generative partnership where the enterprise and technology partner work together to create and build a solution that doesn’t currently exist. The resulting assets are co-owned and produce benefits and revenue for both partners. Generative partnerships are becoming more common. In fact, Gartner forecasts that generative-based IT spending will grow at 31% over the next five years. That is how Johnson Controls and Accenture are now able to share the earnings from a project in which they co-invested. 

Beyond one-to-one connections is the formation of ecosystems of multiple partners. One-to-many partnerships work best when a single enterprise needs to focus many players on jointly solving a single problem, such as a city bringing together public and private entities to serve the citizen. This is what Dubai Digital did when they crested the DubaiNow platform which gives access to over 120 city services from over 30 government and private sector entities.

Many-to-many partnerships are created when a platform brings many different enterprises’ products and services together, to be offered to many different customers. Often called platform business models, these marketplaces, app stores and API stores enable the many to help the many at ecosystem scale.

"Ultimately, what these three types of partnerships show is that the CIO needs to become a partner expert, nurturing connections to build partnerships of all types", said Hung LeHong.

To illustrate his views, he took the example of how Land O'Lakes, one of America's premier agribusiness and food companies. Land O'Lakes used this many to many approach to build a digital platform to improve feed operations for dairy farmers. "The CTO estimated that it would have cost the company $2 billion to build all the solutions on their own", he said. "Instead Land O'Lakes spent less than $45 million to build the platform, thanks to the extensive use of partnerships of all kinds".

Reaching beyond the "where"

When the "where" of work, innovation and business value shifts, this allows CIOs and IT executives to reach beyond the constraints of current thinking. "The answer to the question 'where next' cannot be just in terms of a location or direction. 'Where' is actually the exploration of how value can be found and seized", said Daryl Plummer, Distinguished Research Vice President and Gartner Fellow. "CIOs need to reconsider how they think about value, and how they get to that value. They need a more expansive view of the role technology plays in doing so. And they must be bold to reach beyond the 'where' to discover freedom".

Gartner's research VP said that technology can help CIOs gain freedom from historical insights, legacy business practices and bias.

Freedom from historical insights allows CIOs to use technology to solve world-class problems which may help uncover new sources of value. For example, historical insight suggests that companies need to collect personal data from their customers to create customer intimacy and value. However, Gartner predicts that through 2024, 40% of people will intentionally devalue their personal data, making it difficult to monetize. Individual privacy is a world-class problem, but Gartner believes the solution will come from machine learning and synthetic data. AI-based systems can create artificial - or synthetic - data sets that are valid, predictive and so accurate that personal privacy may not need to be violated in the future.

Daryl Plummer took the example of Levi's use of AI and ML to develop new services - such as Levi's virtual closet and Levi's second hand online store – and optimize shipping models. "Levi's changed legacy business practices to weather the pandemic and solve world-class problems for the customers," he said.

Most organizations attempt to develop inclusive leaders and embed bias mitigation efforts into IT leaders’ common work tasks, but this is not always effective. Overcoming bias requires a built-in response, which may mean machines are sometimes used to direct a person’s ethical compass. For example, AI can help increase financial inclusion and solve bias challenges by helping evaluate people on their ability to consume various financial products, from both affordability and access perspectives. "Freedom from bias doesn’t mean eliminating bias. It means acting to minimize real harms from bias", said Plummer. "Built-in bias requires a built-in response! As a CIO, you should demand technology that has built-in support for minimizing bias, systematically confronting real harms and identifying ways to reduce them".