Gartner Trends @ ITxpo

Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt says Google isn’t trying to make money, they’re trying to change the world. And so goes the interview where he lays out his thoughts on various aspects of their business.

On application innovation: “We’re not trying to design the future. We’re inventing it along the way.”

On their competition: ”We’re not focusing on our competitors. We’re focusing on the future and what our customers like.”

On the enterprise vs. the consumer: “We don’t see the enterprise as a necessarily differerent business from the consumer business. We see consumers wanting similar things in their personal and work life and the technologies are not separate anymore. However, if we offered our enterprise applications for free, that would be too disruptive. So, We decided to build our enterprise model with a new lower price point with very high levels of service.”

On Chrome OS:  “Chrome OS will be free and it will drive down pc costs even more.” They’re going to start with netbooks. A netbook with Chrome OS will be available at some point in 2010. It will not come with a hard drive. Everything will be stored external to the device, but there will be local caching. That way you can do work when you’re off the Internet.

On their niche: “We’re trying to solve the broadest problems with the broadest flexibility. That’s our niche. We build our apps for 100 million people.” 

On their plan:  “All of our services are being hardened. We’re building for robustness, efficiency, and scale. We’re really building a whole new computational platform.”

In his research role at MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research (CISR), Howard Rubin has invested years in researching why IT matters. According to his research, IT investment in a company is a better predictor of its success that other business economic indicators. Global technology spend is $4.2T which is more than the 1990 and 2000 spend combined.

Rubin suggests that the best time to invest in IT is during an economic downturn, and that those who don’t will spend twice as much later to catch up. This doesn’t mean that IT shouldn’t optimize or do things more efficiently – both must occur.

Here are some of Rubin’s parting thoughts:

Questions to Ask:

At today’s CIO lunch we heard a great presentation by Jim Collins, author of Built to Last, Good to Great and How the Mighty Fall. He touched on all his books but focused the talk today on the five stages of decline in How the Mighty Fall and a 10 item “To Do” list to help you prevent the fall. 

The stages of decline are:

1. Hubris Born of Success
2. Undisciplined Pursuit of More
3. Denial of Risk and Peril
4. Grasping for Salvation
5. Capitulation to Irrelevance or Death

Quoting his ideas from Good to Great he mentioned that the reason we don’t have greatness in more places is because overall things are good – suggesting the secret to mediocrity is inconsistency. “Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness is largely a matter of conscious choice and discipline,” said Collins.

If you don’t want to be one of the mighty who falls, Collins suggests the following 10 item “To Do” list:

1. Go to www.jimcollins.com and use the free Good to Great diagnostic tool.
2. Begin tracking the key roles in your organization.
3. Build a personal board of directors to provide a consistent team of people who have the same set of values as you do, and check in with them.
4. “Get the right young people in your presence” and let them challenge you.
5. Turn off all your electronic gadgets! Find “pockets of quietude and whitespace” – block time for no distractions so you can just think.
6. Ask more questions.  Determine your questions to statements ratio and then double it.
7. Start making a “Stop Doing” list – listing the things you need to stop doing.
8. “Abandon titles from your thinking and simply claim what you are responsible for.”
9. Determine your maximum risk level - what will sink you – so you will know when you approach it.
10. Determine your 10 to 20 year BHAG – “Big Hair Audacious Goal” – use vivid descriptions.

TAGS: Gartner, CIOs, Leadership, Jim Collins

Social connectedness and leveraging “the collective” were two big topics presented this morning. IT should embrace these ideas. UCLA research determined that the human brain feels pain and is more sensitive to pain when a person is socially excluded, even in an online social activity. People want to be connected.

I mentioned yesterday that the government makes datasets available to the collective intelligence of the world in hopes of solving our most challenging problems. This collective approach was presented again today. Examples included Ford Motor Co. They gave Ford Fiestas to 20 somethings for 6 months to see what they thought. The British government wanted to audit all the expense records of the Members of Parliament (MP) but didn’t have the staff to do it. They opened up the records to the public and over half the records have already been reviewed. The public participated not just to see how the MPs were spending money, but many participated to just be a part of the process. Several MPs are no longer there and this work will affect their elections next year.

We’ve also heard of individuals who’ve been able to get corporations to respond to issues when they post them in a public digital space. A gentleman’s guitar was broken by U.S. Air baggage handlers and he made a YouTube video about it. Over 5.7 million people tuned in and U.S. Air payed attention. He used typical processes to have his problem resolved and when that didn’t work, he changed his approach. There are many stories like this – because it works.

Analysts also discussed the importance of keeping an fresh eye on institutional IT data and measures - looking for new trends and new patterns that indicate new directions in IT indicators.

TAGS: Gartner, IT, Technology, Research, IT Collective

Vivek Kundra, President Obama’s newly appointed CIO, sees an opportunity to elevate the role of CIOs overall especially in the public sector. The public sector is falling behind on having CIOs at the table where innovation and planning occur at the top levels of an organization. Tactically, he plans to focus IT efforts on transparency, security, data portability, agility and innovation. Transparency is key from the administration’s perspective because the U.S. Government spends $76 billion annually on IT.

One of the most visible outcomes to Kundra’s leadership thus far is the Federal IT Dashboard offering visibility and transparency into the projects and investments in IT by the government. Representatives, senators, cabinet secretaries, watchdog  groups, and citizens alike can all keep an eye on government IT projects.

Another of Kundra’s initial efforts, Data.gov offers access to government datasets that previously weren’t available. The availability of this data is driving massive innovation efforts never before seen. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) released data from their research on the human genome and innovation on research in personal medicine has skyrocketed.  Similarly, when the Dept. of Defense released data on their latest satellite research, it also resulted in massive amounts of innovtion. The idea is to have many eyes on the problems of the world – share data and reap the benefits of the innovation that follows. Kundra states that New York City and San Francisco are in process of following suit with similar efforts in their respecitive cities.

TAGS: Gartner, Federal Government, IT, Technology, Innovation,  Research, CIOs

Today kicks off the first day of the annual Gartner symposium and ITxpo on leading IT research and trends. I arrived last night in order to participate in a Higher Ed Panel discussion on “Major Higher Education E-Learning Market Consolidation – What’s Next?” hosted by Marti Harris, Gartner research director in higher education technology strategies.  After that, I’ll attend the first “Mastermind Keynote Address”, which is an interview with Vivek Kundra, CIO, U.S. Federal Government.

Stay tuned for more blogging on IT trends, emerging technologies, and research…