Gene Phifer
Managing VP
13 years at Gartner
36 years IT industry
Gene Phifer is a managing vice president in Gartner Research. Mr. Phifer covers a broad set of Web and cloud-centric technologies, including Web architecture, intranets, extranets, e-business, portals, Web applications, cloud computing… Read Full Bio
by Gene Phifer | September 28, 2008 | 8 Comments
In talking with lots of clients at Gartner’s Web Innovation Summit, held a couple of weeks ago in LA, the difference between digital natives and digital immigrants was reinforced. As a reminder, digital natives were born in the Internet era and are the folks that are out here blogging, twittering, posting, and socially interacting on the Web, while digital immigrants were born prior to this era, and frequently don’t use Web 2.0 technologies or approaches.
We had lots of Web 2.0 sessions at the Summit, and in talking with clients at roundtables, 1-1′s and during happy hours, it became clear to me that some digital immigrants may never adapt to the Web 2.0 world. These guys know about this stuff, see their teenage children on the Web all the time, and frequently have tried it out, but in their own words, “just don’t get it”. They don’t see the value of broad participation, of communities, of crowdsourcing, and of extensive peer-to-peer interaction. At least they don’t see the value of these things as delivered via Web 2.0 tools like blogs, wikis, social networks, RSS and tagging tools.
Unfortunately, if the folks that “don’t get it” are in decision making roles in their enterprise, adoption of new Web technologies and approaches may be delayed for years in those enterprises. Maybe they will “get it” eventually, but for some, I predict that they will retire before they do.
It’s too bad that this group won’t see this posting, but since they don’t believe in blogging, they won’t have an opportunity to refute my position.
How many digital immigrants will never “get it”? I don’t have a number in mind, but I’d love to come up with one. Any suggestions?
Category: web Tags: blog, digital immigrant, digital native, rss, social network, tagging, web 2.0, wiki
by Gene Phifer | September 21, 2008 | 2 Comments
Gartner’s 2008 Web Innovation Summit was held last week. It was an exciting week, with lots of good buzz from attendees and exhibiting vendors alike. As usual, the analysts did an outstanding job delivering presentations, running roundtable sessions, and doing client 1-1 meetings.
I ran into a few surprises at the Summit.
For one, I was surprised at the number of attendees that were interested in cloud computing. We added two full tracks of cloud content, but I thought that most attendees would be there for the two tracks of Web content. From my informal surveys, it appears that the split was 50-50.
Another learning is the angle on cloud computing that the attendees were looking at. I thought that most would be interested in applications delivered via SaaS, but a large percentage were interested in infrastructure services in the cloud.
These are just a couple of top-of-mind areas that surprised me at the Summit. More learnings to come.
Category: Cloud web Tags: Cloud, cloud computing, SaaS, web, Web Innovation Summit
by Gene Phifer | September 15, 2008 | Comments Off
Finally, Gartner’s Web Innovation Summit 2008 has arrived. As co-chair, I have been working hard on this conference for over nine months. We have an exciting agenda focused on the Web, Software as a Service and Cloud Computing.
I will be presenting the following sessions during the week:
Analyst Keynote
Don’t Forget to Mind the Store: Web Infrastructure and Operations
Mobile Access to the Web
Mastermind Interview: Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com
Infrastructure in the Cloud
Locknote
I’d be interesting in hearing feedback from anybody attending the conference. And if you have questions that we don’t get a chance to answer, drop them into this blog and we’ll entertain them here.
I’m looking forward to a great conference.
Category: Cloud web Tags: Gartner web summit saas cloud phifer
