Opening keynote, leading from the front

The opening keynote was huge, over 3,000 attendees , and was as usual very slick.

Gene Hall, the CEO of Gartner and various analysts talked about "Leading from the Front".  It was a long session, well over an hour, and these are my notes, not had time to turn them into proper English so hope you get the general gist.
IT innovation has been one of the biggest drivers in economic growth in last 30 years. Most of them have reached maturity. For mature, read increasingly obsolete. Now approaching perfect storm. Unprecedented technological change in cloud, mobile, social media, consumerisation of IT.

Only need to look at music, advertising and print media industries, to see the effect disruptive technologies can have.
CIOs will have to lead from the front to drive innovation in IT for business growth
Cloud, mobile. Social, information. Combining to give real disruptive change.
Cloud should be first consideration for all new IT initiatives. Are we ready for that?
Mobile, not a coming trend, it's already happened. Tablets. By 2016 916m will have been sold, and they'll be in the hands of our customers. Are we ready for that?
Mobile OS will have overtaken desktop OS in a couple of years. We've spent 20 years designing for the desktop. Have to change.
Not just mobile, but combine social, information and cloud to  get context aware computing.
This will make the architectures of the last 20 years obsolete.
Financial situation changing, and we may be heading for another recession.
Incremental cost cutting may not be enough. Radical stuff needed and will include shared services, cloud computing.
Big strategic vendors such as Oracle, SAP, HP, IBM will face significant integration challenges in this.
There are two big disruptive vendors, Google and Apple. They don't behave like other vendors. They don't need to.

Businesses have to have no walls, and be flexible, change when our customers change. Three things are important,  Customer delight, customer involvement and customer intimacy. Will change faster than our architectures.

Learn from your customers.
Adapt your business, not your technologies
Go where the customer is.
Invest in company loyalty to the customer.

How will people cope?
We crave simplicity.
People gravitating to the simplicity of mobile and tablet. By 2014 mobile application development projects will outnumber PC projects by 4 to 1

Users want more, but do they need less? Always asking for new features but not using the ones they have.
Simplifying applications and ease of use, gives richer experience if you understand the true needs of the customer and develop only that.
Context aware computing critical, you need to understand intent to deliver richer experience.
Not just about location. About everything in your social and digital world.

By 2015 your digital devices will know more about you than you know about them.

Will need to concentrate on people centric design. Look at patents Steve Jobs took out, nearly all about the user experience, very few about hardware or software.
Experience will have to be on any device, and in any environment.

Think about creative destruction. Burning fields to make them fertile again. Are we capable of it?
Most IT organisations have 70% of resources locked into reliability. Keeping things going. How do we release resources for innovation?
Implement Pace layered application strategy.
Destroy perfectionism and embrace calculated risks.
Never taking risks means you are predictable.
Actively managing destruction is as important as creation.