Jack Santos
Gartner has the Burton Group Catalyst Conference coming up soon – it’s in
Prague the week of June 21st. I’ll be presenting, and providing “Top Kill” presentations from an executive perspective…..pushing down all that valuable thick gear oil of technical information and laying on a mud of executive level summary and review that encompasses a good message for technologists as well – often focusing on the soft side of things. (Sorry for the oil spill allusions).
We have our North American version July 26th in San Diego. There 
we’ll 
have a workshop: “The Gearhead Intervention Program”. It’s a follow-on to a very popular “Gearhead’s Guide to the Corner Office” workshop we held a few years ago and addresses that boundary of push/pull in an IT shop: management vs. labor, gearhead vs. executive, individual vs. the collective. In a 12 step type of format. It will be entertaining and insightful.
It’s perspectives like that that make this aspect of Gartner coverage (the Burton Group content) so important. It really is …
“IT for the Rest of Us” 
It’s wonderful to see that message taking hold in the sales and client meetings I attend. The in-depth, practitioner focused approach of what we are doing at Gartner is really getting traction. I think that’s good, and here’s why.
When I started my career (too long ago to mention), I felt that Gartner (Group) content was relevant, and easily accessible by all of IT – which would typically be a few hundred people in a 20,000-40,000 person company. IT has grown, Gartner has grown, and I have grown (I hope). And the content that Gartner provides for IT leaders and CIOs (through EXP) has become more sophisticated, more thorough, and very much more focused on people that started out as programmer trainees and ended up being part of the management team; people like me!
Now the typical Gartner user base may still number a few hundred in a 20,000-40,000 person company, but the IT department may number 2000-5000. That’s where our new 
Burton content for IT doers comes in. IT professionals, IT practitioners, IT folks that really want to get into the weeds, look at the details, have in depth conversations at the bits and bytes level. Our IT1 offering is an all you can eat smorgasbord. CIOs I speak to are attracted to it because it fills an all important development need for their IT staff, while providing a path to IT technology and strategy analysis that engages them and uses an approach that bridges gearheads and executives..
My role in that smorgasbord is to still make sure that the practitioners, the front line troops, haven’t lost perspective on what’s important to their boss, how it all fits architecturally and business-wise; and how they can develop themselves and their message to make a difference. To help manage the relationship between the gearhead and the corner office. To translate gearhead concerns to executives, constructively. and make sure gearheads position themselves so that they continue to make contributions to the enterprise, and don’t get cornered as technological misanthropes.
Gearhead Intervention – look for it at a Gartner conference near you.
Comments Off
Category: CIO issues Tags: CIO, gearheads
