Mark McDonald

It is October and therefore it must be time for CIOs and IT leaders to gather in Orlando to discuss, debate and shape the future of enterprise IT.  This year’s gathering is special as it’s Gartner’s 20^th symposium. It is also the largest Symposium we have had in recent memory.   Taken together it’s a time of tremendous change.

While the notion of change can be over emphasized, the challenges facing companies and their leaders today cannot.  Companies are taking the turn as they come to the realization that the future is based on where we are today.  CIOs face an environment of increasing enterprise choice and changing economics.  IT professionals rightly ask where do we go from here.

IT is clear that the future will not be a straight-line extension of the past.  Half of CIOs responding to the 2010 CIO Survey indicated that they expected IT change coming out of the recession.  It is changing as CIOs look to restructure IT around new concepts like IT Services, elastic infrastructure and new financial models.    Clearly we are leading in times of transition

Transition is the theme for this year’s Symposium.   Specifically for CIOs the transition is from yesterday’s leadership issues that revolved around creating technology to current concerns about managing resources for efficiency.  However, CIOs are looking beyond managing resources to understanding how they lead to create results and raise productivity.

Executives have new demands for IT’s contribution to productivity, growth and innovation. Business and technology leaders alike recognize they can no longer apply the same practices and expect significantly better results. They feel many mainstream practices have lost their relevance. The situation must change, but how?

Leading CIOs are driving new methods and solutions across all core business leadership and IT management domains by leveraging lighter weight, differentiated practices and technologies. These emerging practices are rapidly becoming the foundation for IT’s business contribution and the new baseline against which performance will be measured

In this environment CIOs are feeling the effectiveness of current practices slipping know that their current practices are losing their punch and they are looking for new practices to take on new challenges.

The 2010 CIO experience concentrates on presentations, workshops and interactive sessions that concentrate on:

• Extending IT’s reach to the business edge
• Achieving leadership and solution imperatives
• Bringing integrity and transparency to measuring IT’s contribution
• Creating a lean and responsive IT organization
• What’s next on the horizon

These sessions are augmented by presentations from thought leaders such as Jim Cash and Jonathan Zitrain as well as a Panel focusing on CIO Leadership.  We’ve assembled more than 50 sessions to give CIOs the opportunity to work with their peers and Gartner to get the answers they need in their context for success in 2011 and beyond.

Welcome.

1 Comment »

Category: Leadership Strategy Technology     Tags: 2011 Planning, IT and Business, Leadership, symposium

Share

Tweet