Mining The Gartner Symposium

[Steve Bennett]

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 Most made me yawn, but these stand-out (from a Gartner post): #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...

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