After Andy Kyte's presentation on application overhaul it was time for the opening keynote, that was scheduled in the afternoon this time.
There are four big trends that change the IT industry as we speak. One is cloud, which is all about elastic capacity. Two is social computing, and the real impact will be more around ethics and culture than it is about technology. Three is context aware computing, which will be much more than location-based services on devices. Computers will also be able to detect language, emotions, desires and respond accordingly. Four is what Gartner has trademarked as Pattern-Based Strategy.
Pattern-based strategy is not based on traditional thinking in terms of 3-5 year strategic plans and large programmes, but one of continuous change. This type of thinking is not new. In an interview in McKinseyQuarterly a few years ago, prof. Richard Rumelt already remarked that sustained competitive advantage is less likely to come from big dramatic shifts and more from continuously spotting tiny changes in the market and surfing that wave with a little bit more skill than anyone else. In fact, I was part of a big research project in 2007 and 2008, in which we dubbed this "management excellence", as a next strategy after operational excellence. Gartner describes three steps to the strategy: sense, model, adapt. We talked about the three pillars of management excellence: being smart, agile and aligned. Sense and model would together be "smart", and adapting equals the agility we meant. However, alignment is equally important, because if your part of the organization (or your organization as part of the value chain) is the only one to adapt quickly, it leads to suboptimal results. It is necessary to be able to roll out changes to the complete value chain.
Gartner also predicted the end of the effectiveness of the acquisition strategy of the mega software vendors. It is indeed possible to acquire innovation, but it is not possible to sustain acquired innovation. In the words of Gartner: "No architectural mediocracy will be accepted". In other words, integration is not enough.
Then, three other concepts were introduced:
· Smart control
· Intelligent business
· IT Dynamism
Smart control means managing IT by loosening grip. The old command and control style of managing IT cannot be successful anymore. It is not possible anymore to prescribe corporate IT solutions. Business users can get their own functionality in the cloud, or deploy their own departmental solutions. It is needed to engage users, and enable to do things themselves. For instance, allow them to define their own business rules and allow them to compose, decompose and recompose their own business rules.
Intelligent business is what comes after "business intelligence". BI has mostly been popular among managers and their staff. But in today's business, everyone needs insight. Business processes become increasingly knowledge-intensive. I think this is what drives pattern-based strategy. Not data warehouses, analytics and BI tools, but sensing change through business processes. After all, it is through your business processes that you interact with customers.
The IT dynamism trend entails not building systems that last a lifetime. From built to last to built to change. Interesting enough, this seemed to be the opposite of what Andy Kyte argued just a few hours before. We need to learn how to build systems without knowing all requirements. However, not all systems are equal (and this is what reconciles the keynote and Andy's presentation). There are three types of systems.
· Systems of record, like a general ledger, do not undergo a lot of change. These can be standardized
· Systems of differentiation need to be built for change. Likely they don't come from integrated software suites, but organizations should consider best-of-breed vendors here.
· Systems of innovation, today typically consisting of internet mashups, and social media
Other topics were discussed as well, but at least this is what I took out of the presentation.
