Gartner's biggest annual get-together (Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2009) is on in Orlando and although I generally don't think too much about it, it does (claim to) bring together over 1,600 CIO's and I was wondering what knowledge I could mine by looking at what people are tweeting, blogging and in other ways posting online.
Here's what I have found. I include some interesting snippets and also a sprinkling of 'stating the obvious'. Gartner remains a fascinating mix of deep insight and banality. I can't resist it, but you can judge the value yourself:
@lgreski: #gartnersym keynote: 75% of leaders surveyed say bad data constrains business. Too much info managed in spreadsheets.
@andreagoulet: Avg team size for big brand twitter team? 4. @jetblue :12 @wholefoods :11 @ford :6 @starbucks :2 Most common 1-2 people "on duty" #ims09
“Just as your business counterparts use fact-based business intelligence data to make decisions regarding investments and resource prioritization to achieve their goals, IT needs to gather and analyze relevant data to run the business of IT,” said the Gartner analysts. By Mike Hill, Gartner
The most blogged news of the conference comes from Gartner Analysts Carl Claunch and David Cearley’s Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2010:
- Cloud Computing
- Advanced Analytics
- Client Computing
- IT for Green
- Reshaping the Data Center
- Social Computing
- Security – Activity Monitoring
- Flash Memory
- Virtualization for Availability
- Mobile Applications
#1: Cloud Computing. Cloud computing is a style of computing that characterizes a model in which providers deliver a variety of IT-enabled capabilities to consumers. Cloud-based services can be exploited in a variety of ways to develop an application or a solution. Using cloud resources does not eliminate the costs of IT solutions, but does re-arrange some and reduce others. In addition, consuming cloud services enterprises will increasingly act as cloud providers and deliver application, information or business process services to customers and business partners.
#2 Advanced Analytics. Optimization and simulation is using analytical tools and models to maximize business process and decision effectiveness by examining alternative outcomes and scenarios, before, during and after process implementation and execution. This can be viewed as a third step in supporting operational business decisions. Fixed rules and prepared policies gave way to more informed decisions powered by the right information delivered at the right time, whether through customer relationship management (CRM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) or other applications. The new step is to provide simulation, prediction, optimization and other analytics, not simply information, to empower even more decision flexibility at the time and place of every business process action. The new step looks into the future, predicting what can or will happen.
#6 Social Computing. Workers do not want two distinct environments to support their work – one for their own work products (whether personal or group) and another for accessing “external” information. Enterprises must focus both on use of social software and social media in the enterprise and participation and integration with externally facing enterprise-sponsored and public communities. Do not ignore the role of the social profile to bring communities together.
#7 Security – Activity Monitoring. Traditionally, security has focused on putting up a perimeter fence to keep others out, but it has evolved to monitoring activities and identifying patterns that would have been missed before. Information security professionals face the challenge of detecting malicious activity in a constant stream of discrete events that are usually associated with an authorized user and are generated from multiple network, system and application sources. At the same time, security departments are facing increasing demands for ever-greater log analysis and reporting to support audit requirements. A variety of complimentary (and sometimes overlapping) monitoring and analysis tools help enterprises better detect and investigate suspicious activity – often with real-time alerting or transaction intervention. By understanding the strengths and weaknesses of these tools, enterprises can better understand how to use them to defend the enterprise and meet audit requirements.
From a presentation by Gartner Senior Analyst Eric Knipp on “Citizen Developers: When End Users Surpass the IT Department in Delivering Business Applications”:
"as much as 25 percent of business applications will be built by “citizen developers” – users outside of the scope of formal enterprise IT – by 2014."
“Future citizen-developed applications will leverage the IT investments beneath the surface,” he said. “Mashups will enable IT to focus on deeper architectural concerns, while end users will focus on wiring together services into business processes and workflows. Furthermore, citizen development introduces the opportunity for end users to address projects that IT has never had time to get to — the vast expanse of departmental and situational projects found beneath the surface.”
A recent report published by Gartner entitled Introducing Pattern-Based Strategy states: “We live in a world of patterns — competitive advantage and survival are about recognizing and acting on patterns before others. Previous strategic planning models were strained to seek changes, predict outcomes, adequately guide decisions and assist leaders in defining governance models that embrace change. Through a focus on pattern-based strategy organizations will move from being ‘reactive’ to being ‘proactive.’” The research note goes on to say, “The environment emerging from the recession demands an increased focus on detecting leading indicators of change, and on identifying and quantifying risk emerging from new patterns, rather than obsessing over lagging indicators of performance. In this way, we move from a world of ’sense and respond’ to one focused on ’seek and act.’”
"Introducing Pattern-Based Strategy," Gartner, 7 August 2009.
A cut-down version of the Gartner roadshow comes to Sydney 17-19 November 2009.
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