Gartner Blog Network

I was at an event a few weeks ago hosted by a leading IT journalist who made the following opening remarks.  “Good times are ahead for IT.  A new investment cycle should happen soon as we have postponed infrastructure upgrades for too long.”  His tone was upbeat and encouraging.  The only thing was that the [...]

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Lightweight technologies, those that do not require a heavy upfront investment or operational requirements, will meet many management and strategic applications needs.  Technologies, such as social computing and software as a service, give business unprecedented levels of choice in how they provision their technology.  Executives are making that choice not for back office commodity systems [...]

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Jim Collins has researched and written extensively about the characteristics of successful companies.  Recently he has published a short book, “How the Mighty Fall,” describing the characteristics of companies that fail.
Collins defines five stages of decline prior to the company’s failure.  Thinking about these characteristics it should be possible to provide insight into changes in [...]

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Welcome to the endgame for a very tough year.  There are only 60 working days left in the year.  There are roughly 60 working days to complete your value delivery for 2009 and plans for 2010.  I use the term roughly both to describe how those days will be and to point out that this [...]

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The answer to the question: Is business is more complex, seems obvious.  The real question is not is business complex but where does your business put that complexity to its advantage and performance?
“Complexity?  Where do I put it?  I can tell you where I would like to put it!”
For many enterprises the question is just [...]

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Recently I had the opportunity to work with two dozen CIOs as the facilitator of a three-hour discussion on their issues. I talked with 15 CIOs prior to the session to understand the issues at the top of their mind and the areas of strength they could contribute to the discussion.  The results, shown in [...]

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Commoditization has been the buzzword threat for IT professionals for years.  This reached a fever pitch with Nicholas Carr’s books about IT.  If you wanted to scare a CIO all you have to do is raise the threat of IT becoming a commodity.  The commodity threat abated some as people rushed to cut their budgets [...]

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Recessions entail more than just a pullback in economic growth; they include a retrenchment in business innovation and activities.  The global recession that began to be formally recognized about a year ago in August 2008, has hit companies hard and their business practices harder – particularly in IT.
With global corporate IT budgets declining an average [...]

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Over the past two weeks, the blog has featured a discussion of 10 trends featured in the July 2009 edition of the Harvard Business Review http://tinyurl.com/l2ooj3.  This is a recap and link posting for people looking to explore and contribute to the discussion as we all face a world of uncertainty and volatility.
This blog entry [...]

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Over the summer McKinsey published their top 10 trends for the next year or so in Harvard Business Review in July 2009 http://tinyurl.com/l2ooj3.  This post discusses the trend related to the future stability of prices.
Price stability in question – an accelerating trend
McKinsey’s final trend to watch involves price stability something that executives had not had [...]

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