Portal, Content and Collaboration Conference

I’m at the Gartner Portal, Content and Collaboration Summit at the moment. So will blog some of the sessions – most will be in note form as time is limited.



Opening keynote was entitled Certain Strategies for Uncertain Times and looked at how we as CIOs need to adapt in these difficult financial times. We are apparently not even halfway through the recession yet - it’s certainly not over. IT is a big cost to an institution and we will be under scrutiny in any cost cutting exercise, and we need to be proactive and show how we can help the business and add value. That’s difficult when we spend about 80% of our budgets just on keeping things running – less than 20% is usually spent on innovation. In order to do this we’ll have to use success measures that are relevant to our institution’s business – not just how little downtime we’ve had, or how well we’re doing in user surveys. Cloud computing and outsourcing definitely being pushed as the way to go. Personally am please to hear that.

Social software also getting a lot of plugs, but with policies for acceptable use - and blocking use is not a policy! Quote from one of the analysts – “if you fired everyone who used Facebook you’d have an empty office”. On a quick show of hands it was astonishing how many organisations do block all social media sites.

The business needs to take social media seriously – think about how you can use it to form communities. That combined with the cost savings associated with open source software is a great opportunity.

A good start to the conference – a lot of stuff we’re already doing but some thoughts to take away.