Thank you for making Symposium/ITxpo 2011 our most inspiring event ever. Your enthusiasm, insights and willingness to share with your peers is why Gartner Symposium/ITxpo is the world s largest and most important gathering of CIOs and senior IT executives. Transforming IT s relevance in an organization Re-imagining IT our theme for 2011 calls for you and your peers to lead from the front. While there still remains a great deal of economic uncertainty, the explosion of IT and advanced technologies is undeniable. As a result, there is a much-needed focus on customers, employees, consumers, competitors and suppliers. They are all quickly becoming part of the IT ecosystem that will be supported by the IT organization. Given that backdrop, it s critical for leaders like you to rethink or re-imagine IT s relevance within the organization. We hope your experience at Symposium/ITxpo this year gave you a fresh pair of eyes on the issues that matter most from supporting new business models to gaining positive impact from transformative technology initiatives like cloud, social networking, mobility and context-aware computing. To assist you in your reporting efforts, we ve created this special report to provide you with an at-a-glance review of select keynotes, session take-aways and other conference highlights. Share your experience and help shape Symposium/ITxpo 2012 Planning for Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2012 is already underway and your input is critical. If there is something you d like to share with us regarding any aspect of the event an idea or suggestion that may have occurred to you since you completed your evaluation form please email simone.hulse@gartner.com. Thank you for your feedback, and we look forward to seeing you again next year at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, 12 15 November 2012, in the Gold Coast, Australia. Contents Message from the chair 2 Key take-aways 2 What attendees asked about 4 Conference session highlights 5 2011 Symposium/ITxpo Sponsors 6 Post-event tools and tips 7 1
Message from Brian Prentice, Research Vice President, Track Manager Brian Prentice Research Vice President, Track Manager Cloud, social networking, context-aware computing and mobility the drivers behind re-imagining IT will have a significant effect on how applications are delivered and managed, regardless if they come packaged, or are developed on-premises or in the cloud. Keeping a step ahead of all this will require you and your enterprise applications group to fundamentally rethink the way you do your job. As enterprise users start to change how they consume applications, you ll need to find new ways to contribute to the business. And that means re-examining your application strategy to determine how to meet these burgeoning needs, including the ones gathering at your doorstep. In the weeks and months to come, your organization s executives, with ipads and smartphones in-hand, will be lining up outside your IT shop asking, How can I get access to things that I need to do? Being able to provide them with the answers means rethinking how you deliver apps for mobile devices. In fact, that aspect of re-imagining IT will be one of the big, defining shifts in spending and effort you ll experience in the coming year. How do you get started? By using new techniques like pace-layered strategies so that you can make the right investments in the right systems and ensure your portfolio accommodates the pace of business change and innovation. Key take-aways Mobility Mobility is rapidly moving from being a client-device focused issue to being a central factor in application design, development and delivery. Because it represents the dawn of the app simpler, single purpose, limited functionality solutions application teams will need to recompose monolithic enterprise applications to meet this newly emerging reality. But that s not all. As mobility continues to drive a growing interest in app stores, application leaders will be faced with the challenges of managing mobile platform proliferation. Decisions will need to be made on when to exploit OS-specific capabilities versus developing homogeneous solutions that work across devices. Megavendors Expect heated battles in integrated systems, platforms, ecosystems and servers. Vendors will increasingly entice you to go all in across applications, BI, middleware and collaboration some down to the hardware. Continue to invest in data, applications and process integration to blend application components from a variety of vendors. 2
Pace-layered strategy Most organizations have a heterogeneous portfolio of business applications and, along with it, a single strategy for selecting, deploying and managing these applications, which can range from mainframe to ipad, data center to cloud, and critical to casual. By using a pace-layered strategy, organizations can segment how applications are managed based on how frequently they change and how critical they are in terms of business competitiveness. They are classified into three categories: systems of innovation, systems of differentiation and systems of record. The traditional slow and deliberate pace of change is reserved for the systems of record, while faster-paced, more responsive processes are used to deliver more differentiating and innovative capabilities at the speed demanded by the business. IT modernization and the cloud As the focus of IT moves from systems to people, organizations will be required to deliver scaleddown versions of content, applications and value-added services to customers and employees personal and home-computing environments. Rather than IT pushing these services to end users, the new model is demand driven, with the end users driving the definition of what they need, how it is delivered and when. For organizations provisioning Web services to their customers and employees for personal consumption or personal application configuration, cloud platforms may provide a reasonable way to deliver diverse systems in a lower cost and more agile way. However, this control by the consumer will trigger a power reversal and a significant paradigm shift. For private sector organizations, consumer to business (C2B) replaces business to consumer (B2C) as the dominant business model. For government organizations, constituent to government (C2G) replaces government to constituent (G2C) as the predominant model. In-memory computing In-memory computing has the potential to offer rapid innovation in computing strategy, providing dramatically faster data access that can profoundly change the nature of some applications. The rapid decrease in memory costs and new strategies for organizing data are making this technically possible and economically affordable by shifting the primary focus for online data from disks to computers central memory. This will drive radical changes in hardware, software and architectures, enabling previously unthinkable applications that deliver real-time business value by merging transactional systems and analytics. User and IT providers should look at in-memory computing as a long-term technology trend will disrupt the IT industry. 3
Social software Organizations must use social software technologies to build social solutions and grow communities to achieve radical benefits. However, when so doing they should avoid the prevalent bad practice of installing social software tools to see what emerges. Rather, they should identify a properly scoped business or community purpose first, and then assemble the proper social software tools and practices to achieve a measurable goal. This means treating social software implementations with the same rigor as any application effort, with the caveat that the skills and activities in building social solutions are significantly different than in traditional applications development. Cloud platforms as a service The best opportunity for differentiation in the cloud is through the direct use of cloud platform services. Choosing to use cloud computing does not require that the entire application be deployed in the cloud. Examine the partitioning options and their implications before deciding on the degree of use of cloud services. When planning to use cloud computing, determine what components of the planned application should be in the cloud (from all to minimal) and what level of cloud architecture is appropriate for each of these components (from IaaS to SaaS). What attendees asked about How do I consolidate, standardize and overhaul my application portfolio? Application managers need to ensure that most of the effort and budget expended goes toward the most valuable applications for the business. Start by taking an inventory of all applications, their total cost of ownership, and current use and risks. To get at the more difficult goal of application consolidation, the IT organization needs to operate through a business-led transformation program that aims to standardize and simplify business processes. Application managers should study the four forms of consolidation projects to see which one is best suited to their needs: Consolidate instances of a system. Eliminate weak applications and transfer their work to similar applications you will keep. Standardize all suitable work to a new application. Migrate all suitable work into one application. 4
Conference session highlights 2020: Social, Mobile, Gaming and Collaboration Impact on Your Portfolio Presenter: Dennis Gaughan, Managing Vice President Dennis Gaughan Managing Vice President Will your enterprise applications group make it to 2020? It will be a world in which rapidly evolving mobile devices and tablets will have replaced aging technology stacks fixated on traditional PCs. Application stores will dominate the way the user thinks about finding and choosing new applications, many of which will feature sophisticated social and gaming capabilities. Advanced Web applications will be a given, and there s a good chance they will be created by citizen developers. Ironically, the interfaces and the applications themselves will be much simpler than traditional enterprise applications now being used. But as Gartner analyst Dennis Gaughan pointed out to attendees, getting to 2020 requires you to create a realistic plan right now that bridges the current state with the future. Integral to that plan: the capability to invest in the modern user experience by leveraging SaaS, social, collaboration, mobile and intelligence technologies. Gaughan encouraged attendees to develop their own applications intelligence and engage business leaders to help redefine sponsorship and project success. Accelerating Innovation by Adopting a Pace-Layered Application Strategy Andy Kyte, Vice President and Gartner Fellow Andy Kyte Vice President and Gartner Fellow Business strategy and market conditions change faster than IT systems can adapt. In 2010, Gartner introduced the pace-layered application strategy framework, an approach that segments the application portfolio based on business value and rate of change into three separate categories: systems of innovation, systems of differentiation and systems of record. But what are the business benefits of implementing the strategy, and how can application leaders implement it without creating chaos? Gartner analyst Andy Kyte introduced attendees to the concept and provided guidance on adoption, governance and change management. A pace-layered strategy can establish a development environment with tools and resources to make innovative apps faster and easier. Once classified as a separate category of applications, they would have a separate budget and governance process. Application leaders can start to build a pace-layered strategy by associating each application with the business process it supports; adapting the application governance models to the fit the objectives and needs of the three layers (innovation, differentiation and record) and by building awareness of pace layers throughout the organization. Re-experience the wisdom and wit of Symposium/ITxpo keynote speakers. Access them along with key session recaps at gartner.com/au/symposium. 5
Thank you to our 2011 Platinum Sponsors Please click here to view ALL sponsors 6
Post-event tools and tips Continue learning through Events On Demand and research reports Gartner Events On Demand Visit GartnerEventsOnDemand.com for: Attendee access Free streaming access for up to one year or upgrade to the download option. Share free access with a colleague Click on Register and gain access to 100 free sessions across the portfolio. If you have any questions, please contact eventsondemand@gartner.com. Learn more with relevant research Want to learn more about the topics that interest you most? Turn to the end of each analyst-led presentation for a list of related Gartner research notes. Gartner research is available on demand at gartner.com. Make the case for attending Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2012 Demonstrate the business value of Gartner Symposium/ITxpo with our online Justification Toolkit metrics and measures that clearly show how your attendance can make a direct contribution to your organization s success. Please visit gartner.com/au/symposium for your customizable template. 7