Opening keynotes

Well, first proper day of Symposium is nearly over, and I've got half an hour before my final one-to-one analyst session - so I'm taking the opportunity to sit in the sun and write this. It's been a busy day, and as usual I'm feeling a combination of enthused and knackered.

Opening keynote was about the emerging trends that Gartner think that we should be addressing - this session is always very upbeat and stage managed - lots of music, slides, lights and dramatic statements - but it set the scene well. Key themes were:
Globalise - key developing areas are India and China. Thats where the workforce is, and the markets
Connect - context is going to be all important in connectivity. WYNIWYG - what you need is what you get. Network intelligence will be utilised - far more than presence awareness. The network knows about your present state and can anticipate your future state.
Eg calendar knows you have an appointment. Sat nav knows where. Phone knows contact details, document management system has papers.... put it all together.
Socialise - the most transformational movement today is the socialisation of technology.
The market value of Facebook is more than Marks and Spencer. Plentyoffish.com – a dating site has 2.5m visitors month and makes 10m dollars per year. It has 1.5 employees - how do we compete in this kind of productivity? Need to look at turning your customers into a sales force, marketing team, helpdesk.
Industrialise - utilise the power of cloud computing.
Advance - learn to take risks instead of avoiding them all the time


Second session was another big keynote - Why IT Leaders place IT Strategy before Business Strategy - excellent presentation from the entertaining Andy Kyte. It was all about Asset mangement - assets being everything under the IT department's control - people, processes, hardware, software, services. He talked a lot about systems that we sometimes refer to as legacy systems. he had two definitions of legacy - something that works (if it didn't work you wouldn't still be running it), or something that was here before I was appointed! His view was that we shold adopt a life cycle approach to these systems - take a 7 year look at them - identify areas for development and improvement. An IT Strategy is a process -not a project, and IT managers need to become asset managers, not an expense manager. Portfolio management – need portfolio strategies to clean up, reduce dependencies, simplify and reduce complexity.

Accept that you can't make everyone happy. I liked this next bit - Governance creates options but management decides.