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Information: The Oil of the 21st Century
At the Gartner Symposium 2011 insights were delivered into
the latest trends, views and the agenda that would shape IT in 2012. By Jasmine
Desai
Peter Sondergaard, Senior VP & Global head of Research, Gartner, discussed
how CIOs could go about reimagining IT |
The Gartner Symposium ITxpo 2011 held in Mumbai dealt with
four major trends shaping the IT landscape—Mobile, Context, Cloud and Social
Computing.
IT spending in India is projected to $73.1 billion in 2012,
a 9% increase from 2011. The Symposium commenced with Re-Imagine IT: Leading
from the Front. “Businesses are increasingly looking to IT to support the
challenges of enhancing customer support, supply chain management, optimizing
business processes or helping drive innovation in the business,” said Peter
Sondergaard, Senior VP & Global Head of Research, Gartner. “These demands
are being placed on IT in environment in which the infrastructure foundation
of IT within many enterprises may not entirely be in place. IT is also in transition
from being viewed as a back office support function to a front line business
focused function.”
The new era of computing brings with it compelling forces
that demands understanding.
The Cloud combines the industrialization of IT capabilities and the disruptive
impact of new IT-led business models. However, the shift away from traditional
IT acquisition models to public Cloud services is still in its infancy. “What
supply chain models did to manufacturing is what Cloud computing is doing to
in-house data centers. It is allowing people to optimize around where they have
differentiated capabilities.” said Sondergaard of Gartner.
The next stage of social computing is about mass-customer,
mass-citizen, and mass-employee involvement with enterprise systems. There are
1.2 billion people on social networks. IT leaders must incorporate social software
capabilities throughout their enterprise systems.
Aman Munglani, Research Director, Gartner gave an insight into Top 10 Strategies
for Surviving Unconstrained Data Growth |
The concept of one enterprise data warehouse containing all
information needed for decisions is dead. Multiple systems, including content
management. Data warehouses, data marts and specialized file systems ties together
with data services and metadata, will become the ‘logical’ enterprise
data warehouse.
The shift to the mobile is almost overtaking many IT organizations
who cannot move fast enough to catch up. “It requires IT to re-imagine
the way that it provides applications,” said Sondergaard of Gartner. “By
2014, private app stores will be deployed by 60% of IT organizations. The applications
themselves will be redesigned and they will become context-enabled, understanding
the user's intent automatically.”
The symposium scrutinized various aspects, one of them being
how IT can make a more strategic contribution to the business. “If you
think that the task ahead of you is to simply introduce a new technology, standardize
a disparate set of computer systems across the corporation, update vendor agreements
and revise the IT governance structure for your company—think again,”
said Mark Raskino, Vice President & Gartner fellow. Over the next two to
three years, CIOs will be tasked in helping business leaders identify, develop
and instill new Strategic Business Capabilities (SBCs) to help restore businesses
to full health in the post-recession world.
Hung LeHong, Research VP, Gartner spoke on Context Aware Computing Scenario:
New Experiences, New Ecosystems |
A new CIO manifesto was outlined asserting that generating
revenue must become a new and central component of their IT organization’s
mission for the rest of this decade and beyond. The four key principles of the
CIO manifesto include:
Information is just as important, if not more important than
information technology. Information is the oil of the 21st century. Enterprises
are generating an unprecedented amount of information of enormous variety and
complexity. The need to leverage this data for greater business value is leading
to a change in data management strategies known as big data. This is resulting
in the creation of a pattern-based strategy architecture that seeks signals
in the information, models them for their impact and then adapts to the organization’s
business processes.
By 2016, over 50% of annual CIO project spending will be
directed toward measurably improving the financial conditions of an enterprise.
All too often CIOs and IT practitioners cannot quantify the business value that
information and IT delivers to an enterprise. It is doubtful that the financial
benefits of a large percentage of new IT projects could be audited and measured
for the financial benefits that they have brought to an enterprise.
Phillip R Sargeant, Research VP, Gartner, talked about the Cloud computing
scenario |
By 2020, over 50% of all enterprise information and IT spending
will directly support revenue-generation rather than expense-related business
processes. Most IT applications for the past few decades have primarily supported
business processes related to the expense side of an income statement. CIOs
must lead their staffs to identify how information and IT can foster organic
revenue growth of existing as well as new products and services.
The incentive portion of CIO compensation will be derived
from the amount of money created by the efforts of CIOs and their staffs. CIOs
who want a permanent place at strategic planning tables must be willing to take
on the same types of risk-reward compensation scenarios crafted for the CEO,
head of sales and other senior executives. CIOs who can convert information
into new savings and new revenue and IT into cost savings will have little difficulty
with such a compensation scenario.
“The time has come to challenge some of the most commonly
held IT organization, operations and leadership beliefs,” said Partha Iyengar,
Head of Research- India, Gartner. “Becoming a money-making CIO requires
challenging the efficacy of all current IT business practices, and CIOs really
need to take control of the purse strings. For the next two years, business-initiated
requests for new IT projects should only be undertaken if they yield measurable
and auditable financial benefits for the enterprise.”
jasmine.desai@expressindia.com
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