Gartner Symposium, day 1

I’m blogging along with Dan Farber and David Berlind from the Gartner Symposium/IT Expo this week. What follows are some key strategic planning assumptions and summaries from the sessions I attended yesterday, all from different tracks.

What Does It Mean to Be a ‘World-Class’ IT Organization?

• By 2008, IT organizations that fail to align their IT strategies to the expectations of their chief stakeholders will cede influence to other IT providers (0.8 probability).

Michael Gerrard started his talk with an interesting analogy: "While everyone knows what world class means, they have trouble describing it…just like pornography."  He said that it boils down to effectiveness. "World class is about consistency and effectiveness maintained over time and across change. As such, it can only be judged retrospectively, not just based on short-term," said Gerrard. To move your IT organization along the path to world-class status, he recommended that you focus on three key areas: alignment, governance, and service delivery.

The Future for IT Organizations and IT Management — Going Where We Weren't Going Before

• In 2005 and 2006, recovering economies and continuing business and business process globalization will propel business and technological innovation (0.8 probability).
• By 2010, 50 percent of IT organizations will refocus on brokering services and shaping business demand, rather than on delivering IT services directly, from about 5 percent in 2004 (0.7 probability).
• By 2010, there will be at least 30 percent fewer in-house IT jobs than in 2000, IT services businesses will need less than one-half of the jobs displaced, and at least one-half of those jobs will be in another region (0.7 probability).
• At least one-third of 2004 CIO roles will transform or disappear by 2009 (0.7 probability).
• By 2010, at least one-half of new outsourcing deals will use measures based on business outcomes, not IT service levels (0.7 probability).

Gartner's John Mahoney advised businesses to build capabilities in business process design, delivery, and transformation and to blend capabilities in business and technology throughout the organization.

Emerging Trends: 2010 Through 2015

• The most disruptive trend is the convergence of ubiquitous access, ambient intelligence and semantic connectivity. They will drive disruptions and opportunities as significant as the World Wide Web, by 2010 (0.6probability).
• By 2015, an average urban consumer will have his physical senses augmented by more than 20 pieces of real-time information, up from one to two in 2004 (0.7 probability).
• Microcommerce opportunities for new products and services less than $5 will generate $30 billion in revenue per year by 2010 (0.7 probability).
• By 2010, 70 percent of the population in developed nations will spend 10 times longer per day interacting with people in the electronic world than in the physical one (0.6 probability)

The talk echoed much of what I heard at a similar session several years ago, so the themes are pretty much the same. Gartner's recommended action approach makes sense: As part of the technology planning process, use potential impact to help prioritize investments in candidate technologies and projects.