The conversation around digital sustainability has entered a new phase. For years, CIOS have been told to make IT “greener”, to buy renewable energy credits, extend device lifecycles or offset datacentre emissions. Yet despite these efforts, 80% of global CIOs have made or are planning strategic pivots to rein in cost and complexity, even as IT operations continue to drive up carbon emissions.
Across industries, years of layered transformation have left organisations running tangled architectures, overlapping platforms, and neglected legacy systems. Each new layer consumes more compute, storage, and power, adding to the hidden environmental and financial costs of digital growth.
Idle workloads in datacentres, for example, can contribute significantly to energy consumption. Addressing this “more-is-more” technology trap will define the next era of sustainable IT leadership.
Innovation can increase energy use
In 2025, CIOs face an uncomfortable truth: innovation and over-consumption have become two sides of the same coin. Generative artificial intelligence (AI), cloud proliferation and edge computing promise agility and intelligence, but they also magnify energy use and resource demand.
Gartner’s latest CIO and Technology Executive Survey shows that 89% of $10B-plus organisations plan to increase AI investment next year, while more than half will continue funding on-premise infrastructure. Many organisations are still evaluating whether all this growth is fully necessary or sustainable.
This is where the minimalist CIO emerges. Minimalism in IT doesn’t mean doing less innovation; it means designing systems to achieve maximum value with minimum waste. It’s a mindset shift from additive to intentional technology design, one that treats every new platform, application programming interface (API), or data store as a potential liability as well as an asset.
The hidden cost of complexity
The financial and environmental cost of excess IT rarely shows up in budgets. Beneath the visible spend lies an iceberg of deferred upgrades, redundant licences, and under-used cloud commitments. Each carries a carbon cost: every server running past its efficiency curve, every idle workload drawing power in a hyperscale datacentre.
Ignoring this technology debt compounds both fiscal and environmental risk. Gartner modelling suggests that organisations that rationalise applications and align investment to core business capabilities can reduce technology debt by around 11% and IT-related emissions by nearly 15%. Simplification, in other words, pays twice: in efficiency and in sustainability.
From additive design to intentional architecture
Minimalist CIOs focus on architecture over accumulation. They recognise that sprawling systems aren’t just expensive, they’re brittle, insecure, and carbon-intensive. By embedding “digital sobriety” principles into architecture design, procurement, and governance, leaders can transform sustainability from a side project into a structural outcome.
That shift requires new habits:
- Align IT budgets to capabilities, not technologies, to eliminate redundant systems and shadow IT.
- Embed sustainability in sourcing decisions, evaluating suppliers on emissions, water use and circularity, not just cost. By 2027, half of all tech sourcing decisions are expected to use sustainability as a disqualifying factor.
- Design for sufficiency, not excess, by optimising compute demand, consolidating data, and retiring non-critical workloads.
These practices reflect a more mature view of IT value, one where every watt of energy, every gigabyte of data, and every pound of spend contributes to business and planetary outcomes alike.
Choose fewer suppliers, demand more impact
The minimalist CIO reframes efficiency as leadership. Instead of pursuing endless expansion in tools and suppliers, they “choose less and demand more.” Multifactor sourcing models, which balance cost, performance and environmental stewardship, are replacing the single-factor logic of speed and scale.
This isn’t austerity; it’s alignment. A streamlined technology stack is easier to secure, simpler to manage, and measurably greener. In practice, that means reducing supplier sprawl, insisting on transparent carbon reporting, and integrating sustainability KPIs into service-level agreements (SLAs).
CIOs who do this well find they unlock not just savings, but influence, earning credibility across the C-suite as sustainability becomes a shared board priority.
Measuring IT success by efficiency, not expansion
The defining question for technology leaders is no longer how fast they can transform, but how responsibly they can. Complexity once signalled ambition; today, it signals inefficiency.
The most advanced digital organisations will be those that create the most value from the fewest moving parts. Minimalism is not an end state, it’s a discipline. It asks leaders to build intentional architectures, retire technical excess, and measure progress in outcomes, not outputs.
As regulatory and investor pressure around emissions intensifies, simplicity will emerge as both a cost advantage and a climate imperative. The next generation of CIOs will be remembered not for the scale of their technology estates, but for the clarity of their design.
