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Gartner: Time to Re-Imagine Role of IT [Professional Services Close - Up](Professional Services Close - Up Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Modernizing technologies are not enough for CIOs to succeed; it is time for IT leaders to re-imagine IT, according to Gartner, Inc. This is the era of mass collaboration driven by the consumerization of IT, the Company said. For an IT leader to thrive in this environment, they must re-imagine their role, and they must lead from the front. During the opening keynote at Gartner Symposium/ITxp, Gartner analysts told an audience of 8,500 CIOs and IT leaders there are three initiatives to implement to re-imagine IT: post-modern business, simplicity, and creative destruction. "IT leaders must embrace the post-modern business, a business driven by customer relationships where the customer is everywhere, and so must your business; a world fuelled by the explosion in information, collaboration, and mobility, enabled by the cloud," said Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president at Gartner and global head of Research. "You must pursue simplicity by putting people and their needs at the center of design. You must dare to employ creative destruction to eliminate legacy, and selectively destroy low impact systems." "A post-modern business is one that completely rethinks the status quo of business and embraces dramatically new relationships with its customers, suppliers, and partners," said Daryl Plummer, managing vice president and Gartner fellow. "In the post-modern business, your business has no walls. It must be everywhere. It will be a virtual and fluid business that changes as customers change. In the post-modern business, you will forget phrases such as 'business architecture' and embrace phrases like customer delight, customer involvement, and customer intimacy. In the post-modern business, customer and constituent demands on you will change faster than your architectures." "In a world where the average company only lasts 10 years, every added point of customer satisfaction alone could add one year to the life of your business," Plummer said. "Post-modern businesses don't spend all their money just on customer loyalty programs. They invest in company loyalty to the customers." "Cloud brokerages can aggregate, integrate, govern, or customize cloud services to make those services more specific to the needs of the consumers," Plummer said. "They will re-imagine business, and post-modern businesses will even re-imagine the roles that IT departments will play. Three out of 10 IT organizations will become cloud brokers for their business, and that is one way they will survive." "We live in such a complex, time-crunched world," said Hung LeHong, research vice president at Gartner. "The result is that we all crave simplicity, and so in re-imagining IT, IT leaders have the opportunity - no, the responsibility - to deliver simplicity to their customers and employees." Gartner noted its analysts said evidence of this demand to simplicity has been the shift from PCs to mobile. People are gravitating to the simplicity of the mobile and tablet experiences, and developers are following. "By 2015, mobile application development projects targeting smartphones and tablets will outnumber PC projects by 4 to 1. The PC is no longer king," LeHong said. "IT needs to be part of building out this future. Things should be so simple that people should be able to do what they need to do on any device." With the shift to the mobile world, Gartner analysts said context- aware computing is crucial. It helps IT leaders understand intent, so that they can create simpler, yet richer experiences. "Context-aware computing is the intersection between our separate lives in the digital, mobile, social and physical world," LeHong said. "Context-aware applications take context about me in the physical world - such as my location, time of day - and my usage patterns in the digital world, and deliver it to the me in the mobile world." "Simplicity done right does not eliminate complexity, it makes it invisible," LeHong said. "You're not trying to 'dumb down' an experience; you're trying to enrich it." "Most IT organizations have 70 percent or more of their time, money and mindshare locked into reliability, keeping things going," said Tina Nunno, vice president and analyst at Gartner. "Yet demands for game changing IT capabilities are growing every year. IT leaders must transform their businesses, products, services, and value proposition to the external customer, and challenge traditional ways of thinking." Gartner recommends IT leaders implement the concept it calls the "Pace Layered Application Strategy." "Pace layering is a technique to help IT leaders make decisions about what assets in their portfolio are candidates for creative destruction. The model borrows from the way architects design buildings - separating what has to change frequently - from what is foundational and longer-term in nature," Nunno said. "You have Systems of Record, Systems of Differentiation, and Systems of Innovation, each with their own natural lifecycles and place in the business ecosystem." Gartner analysts said IT leaders must destroy perfectionism and embrace calculated risk. CIOs tend to be perfectionists who are highly detail-oriented. It's what has made so many of them good at their jobs. However, it can sometimes lead to issues with risk and uncertainty. "Never taking risks means you are predictable and an easy target for your competition," Nunno said. "Strive to take calculated risks and surprise both your business and the competition." Gartner is an information technology research and advisory company. More information: gartner.com ((Comments on this story may be sent to [email protected])) (c) 2011 ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved. |