According to the findings of the 2015 Gartner chief executive officers (CEO) and senior business executive survey, growth remains a top priority with CEOs and technology-related change is viewed as the primary tool to achieve growth in 2015 and 2016. Further, leaders expect positive business conditions and accelerating technology innovation in 2015.
The Gartner CEO and senior business executive survey covering 400 senior business leaders in user organisations worldwide was conducted in the last quarter of 2014. Majority of the organisations which participated in the survey had annual revenue of $1 billion or more. The survey results indicate that business conditions are good though not spectacular and stability is good enough to enable strategic investments.
The key findings of the survey included:
Customer-facing and analytics capabilities remain in the foreground for most of the survey respondents. When it comes to top technology investments over the next five years, 37 per cent of respondents ranked customer engagement management as the leading technology-enabled business capability, followed by digital marketing at 32 per cent and business analytics at 28 per cent.
Cloud-based business also now has high recognition, as CEOs come to realise that the cloud is where new disruptive and controlling industry platforms get created. However, the standout finding from this year?s survey was the meteoric rise of the Internet of Things, a term that barely garnered any recognition in previous years.
With digital starting to fundamentally change the nature of industries, CEOs? security and risk concerns are rising. About 77 per cent of survey respondents agreed with the statement that ?The digital world is creating new types and levels of risk for our business,? and 65 per cent agreed that ?Investment in risk management practices is not keeping up with new and higher levels of risk.?
Commenting on the survey results, Mark Raskino, vice-president and Gartner fellow, said, ?Each year we ask CEOs to state their top five business priorities and this year growth was once again the top priority. However, explicit mentions of growth were down from last year. We attribute this decline not to less interest in growth, but rather to increasing interest in the mechanism that will create it?
He further added, ?The second-most-important category of business priority for 2015 and 2016 is technology related. This is the highest position we have ever seen for technology in this survey and it?s our firm belief that CEOs are more focused on this area than at any time since 1999. When we examine the subtext of the responses, the purpose of CEOs? interest in technology becomes immediately obvious. Over half of the responses relate to revenue and growth-related technology issues such as multichannel, e-commerce and m-commerce?
