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Loading ...Peter Sondergaard from Gartner, spoke today here at Orange Business Services Orange Business Live 2010 event. He gave an over arching view of the challenges facing business and CIOs today, where – in his words – IT is shifting its focus towards towards balancing risk, cost, growth and innovation. I’ve attempted to catch what he said in this post.
Gartner lists amoungst CEO’s key business priorities that “IT-enabled changes will be a key element in post-recession strategy” – That means IT departments need to be more agile, or they will simply get outsourced. IT doesn’t control the economy, the environment, or the proliferation of technology, but it must deal with these three issues, said Peter.
The issue of business moving to Asia loomed large (as mentioned in the keynote earlier in the day). Can you accord a $25/month Salesforce.com solution if you have sales teams that are paid $100/month? We must “revisit behaviours” because the world is changing. The environment we have come into is one that is suffering from an erosion of trust as well – with $30 Billion of Lehman assets being found today, people are questioning the capabilities of businesses.
Risk is not just ‘security’ risk, it is using technology to manage risk across the business (cf BP and risk management). IT also gets to pick up responsibility for dealing with carbon cost remediation, and dealing with the proliferation of devices and data at the same time.
A couple of soundbites from Peter:
- “There are a billion transistors for every human on early”
- “The number of SMS messages on a daily basis, exceeds the number of people on earth”
- Don’t find the new things in the data centre, it is at the edge where data is created.
The end user owns and innovates. The job of IT is now to facilitate that.
Social Computing was identified as trend #1.
“Business that block access will be loosers, those that support it will be winners” Peter Sondergaard.
Trend #2: Device proliferation. The ongoing consumerization of IT. Different device form factors, entertainment, and always on technology. The term “context aware computing” was new buzz word of the session for me – IT that knows: Who you are. Where you are . What you are doing. “Location is the key to context, and time is the trigger.”
Trend #3: Advanced analytics. Not the backward looking analytics that we are used to, but forward looking-pattern sensing models that sense weak signals in the data, and bring those signals back into the organistion to inform and alter strategy. Interestingly the examples Peter gave were, to me at least, actually ones that used social technology to connect consumers and product organisations.
Trend #4 Cloud computing, or rather its evolution. It is clear that everyone is still struggling to define what cloud computing is. Gartner has their one definition, but everyone, not just every organisation, but individuals too, have their own perspective. There are key themes though: service elasticity, scalability and internet technologies.
Peter gave a touching eulogy for Unified Communications – A technology full of promise, that has been firmly jumped by social media. That’s not to say people aren’t deploying it – there are, in droves, is is just that it has moved along the hype cycled to deployment and is now business critical and business sensible. It’s just that the ‘spotlight’ has moved on. Unified Communications is business as usual.
Garnter reaffirmed that mobiles (smart phones) are the emerging path to a ubiquitous technology platform. We are only a few years away from 80% of users having smart phones (if we aren’t there already). That’s world changing stuff.
All-in-all, a lot to digest. There was a healthy Q&A with Orange Business Service customers at the end, with Cloud Computing being a clear top of the agenda. From my perspective, being a CIO has never been more challenging. Now, it’s been getting harder from a long time.
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