2023 looks set to be challenging for businesses right across Europe. What can IT functions do to help their organizations survive and thrive?
2022 was a hard year for many organizations, with staff shortages, cost inflation, supply chain issues, and more. If anything, 2023 looks set to be even tougher here in Europe, with GDP growth forecast to fall from 3.3% across the EU in 2022, to around 0.3% for 2023.
[1] We’re headed for an uncomfortable combination of low growth and high inflation known as “stagflation
,”
[2] made more complex this time by historically high levels of employment.
As individuals, we can’t change the trajectory of the economy, but as IT professionals, we can take steps to help our organizations flourish despite headwinds. In this blog post, we’ll look at how IT leaders can support innovation, agility, and employee engagement to materially improve the prospects of their organizations in 2023.
Innovation
At a time when Europe’s economies are flatlining, enabling your organization to innovate will be critical to its future success—according to Forrester
, “Firms with advanced technology-driven innovation practices grow three to four times faster than the industry average.”
[3] There are many ways to drive innovation, and the best approach is the one which works for you, but all require a purposeful intent, investments of time and resources, and of course openness to eventual new ways of doing.
You can encourage innovation in your organization by ensuring your IT environment supports experimentation. SolarWinds products can be a good fit for test environments because all of our
solutions are quick and easy to deploy, and free to use during the trial period. If the innovation proves effective and needs to scale into production—often the most tricky aspect of successful innovation—SolarWinds remains a solid choice, with solutions which are designed for scale e.g. up to one million network elements for
network monitoring.
Agility
Alongside embracing new ways of doing new things, to succeed in 2023, European organizations need to become more nimble in their responses to unplanned change. According to McKinsey, agility can be a major growth driver, since “successful agile transformation can deliver 20% to 30% improvement in financial performance
.”
[4] But most organizations are still only in the earliest phases of embracing agile—McKinsey also showed that of 2,190 organizations surveyed, only 7% have completed their agile transformation, but with only 10% including their whole organization in-scope.
[5]
You can help your organization be agile by ensuring your technology function is capable of rapid response to new needs or new incidents. Making sure you’ve always got a clear view of what’s happening within your environment is a great first step—and something
SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted (formerly known as Hybrid Cloud Observability) aims to help with. Replacing human action with software automation will also help accelerate responses, and something which
SolarWinds ITSM can help enable.
Employee Engagement
Helping connect with and retain current staff is a third pillar of success in 2023, but it’s still a challenge. As IDC reports, “European organizations are under severe pressure as employees have new requirements related to compensation, working conditions, flexible work, and career development”
[6]—and it disproportionately impacts tech teams, with only 29% of IT workers showing a high intention to stay with their current employer.
[7]
A positive workplace experience is a must for staff retention, and for remote workers, the tech team needs visibility of performance across networks, infrastructure, and applications. One simple solution is to deploy
SolarWinds Observability SaaS (formerly known as SolarWinds Observability) products. These can also improve engagement across your IT teams, where a single set of tools can help drive collaboration and help break down silos between specialisms.
Conclusion
As IT professionals, it’s natural we focus first on optimizing and improving the technologies which support the business, and if we’re thoughtful, our impact on the business can be much more significant. Helping accelerate the adoption of new ideas and processes, enabling rapid responses, and keeping co-workers engaged and loyal will all be highly supportive in 2023—and modern observability solutions are a strong next step to help your organization survive and thrive over the next twelve months.
