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 Back to 2006 Press Releases
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Gartner Calls for a Different Mission from Information Technology |
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Competitive advantage will come from IT projects that enable business growth by augmenting the behaviour of key knowledge workers
Web 2.0 will play critical role in improving knowledge worker performance |
Gartner Symposium/ITxpo, Barcelona, Spain 22 May 2006 - Businesses that succeed today and in the future will be those who are best equipped to do the non-routine; that is find opportunities, create concepts and build teams to develop and deliver competitive advantage, according to Gartner. To achieve this, companies need to take what Gartner calls a 'high-performance workplace' approach. This combines technologies, processes and management structures to enable knowledge workers to collaborate and find new ways to create value for their companies. Gartner said that adoption of Web 2.0 concepts will encourage and enable the move towards a high performance workplace.
Speaking at its annual Symposium/ITxpo in Barcelona, analysts said the role of IT has been primarily focused on cost cutting - often by automating routine processes. Although some automation benefits remain, this alone is not enough to keep a company competitive. Businesses need a fundamental shift in the way they use IT to create value.
Gartner said the biggest revenue impact will come from IT projects that enable business growth by augmenting the behaviour of key knowledge workers and making them more innovative, creative and productive. Gartner stressed that this will create far greater competitive advantage because it is much harder for competitors to emulate.
"The bottom line is that today's successful companies are both agile and innovative, and a key ingredient is the way they leverage IT to raise the impact of their talents for structural and breakthrough innovation," said Regina Casonato, managing vice president at Gartner. "The source of competitive advantage is people. If you can raise the impact of your people you can achieve competitive advantage."
However, Ms Casonato stressed that using technology to improve employee effectiveness rather than to replace workers with machines demands a fundamental change in the way businesses are organised and operate. "The rise of the knowledge worker engenders a total rethink of the concept of productivity, which can no longer be measured by output per hour."
According to Ms Casonato, Web 2.0 technologies, in particular, will play a crucial role. They extend the scope, scale and potential for communities and collaborative working by enabling decentralised innovation and generating rapid consumer-driven change, which will significantly enhance business growth.
Gartner predicts that within ten years, 80 percent of the work performed by employees will be non-routine, non manual and collaborative. Collaboration and community are tools of innovation - people are developing new social norms and changing technology direction with these tools. They are also tools of learning; people learn how to discover, join, use, influence or even manipulate communities.
Collaboration beyond the individual organisation
The rise in interaction-based knowledge work goes beyond individual organisations. Gartner predicts that by 2009, 60 percent of new collaboration-related IT projects will seamlessly incorporate suppliers, partners and customers compared to less than 10 percent in 2004.
"Globalisation, the dispersed workforce, the extended enterprise, multitasking, flattened organisations ... numerous trends are pushing people to work with each other who wouldn't have come together a decade or two ago," said Nikos Drakos, research director at Gartner.
He added, "Taking a collaborative approach can lead to greater customer intimacy beyond the traditional sense of personalised customer service or targeted service delivery. Much more interesting is the two-way communication to involve customers in the early stages of product or service design, customisation or even delivery and support. The network effects achieved by organisations that successfully leverage collaboration and two-way engagement across their ecosystems are fast becoming at least as important as economies of scale as a source of competitive advantage."
The collaboration market
The 2006 Gartner EXP survey of 1400 CIOs shows that CIOs are starting to focus on how IT can improve productivity and performance. For the first time, collaboration technologies entered the top ten technology priorities, emerging as CIO's fourth largest technology concern. This is also reflected in the growth of the collaboration software market. Gartner estimates that $6 billion was invested in new portal, collaboration and content management software licenses in 2005. This is predicted to increase to more than $9 billion by 2009.
Implementing a high-performance workplace
Gartner warned against taking an over simplified view of the high performance workplace and the skills, technologies and structures that are required to make it a reality.
According to Jeff Mann, research vice president at Gartner, "IT departments need to take a more differentiated view of the collaboration technologies and facilities that their organisation needs. Currently it is often a one-size fits all approach, rather than a considered strategy taking into account individual requirements across the business."
He added, "Merely providing all employees with email and calendaring is no longer enough. IT departments will also need to expand what they accept, and in some cases, lighten up some of the restrictions they have been very diligent in applying to support flexibility and agility, while retaining control. This is a new concept for the IT department."
Predicting which vendors will deliver the lion share of these technologies and services in the future is far from straightforward. "The main vendors, namely IBM and Microsoft, are rapidly reengineering their products to take into account new technologies and to support different ways of working together," said Mr Mann. "As they race to compete with each other, potential newcomers such as Google are appearing in the rear view mirror."
Gartner stressed that the most difficult aspect of raising workplace performance lies not in the adoption of the new technologies, but in managing the cultural, behavioural and social aspects that such change engenders. Developing or hiring individuals in the IT organisation who have the skills, inclination and objective to focus on the cultural, behavioural and social aspects of using IT will be one of the critical priorities for CIOs to raise workplace performance."
Note to Editors:
Community and Collaboration is one of the four pairs of trends highlighted in the Gartner Symposium opening keynote. According to Gartner, these trends are set to create an unstoppable whirlwind of change that will bring about a level of transformation in people's personal lives, within the enterprise, and within society that is possibly greater than at any time since the industrial revolution.
About Gartner Symposium/ITxpo
Gartner Symposium/ITxpo is the IT industry's largest and most strategic conference, providing business leaders with a look at the future of IT. For more than 10,000 IT professionals from the world's leading enterprises, Gartner's annual Symposium/ITxpo events are key components of their annual planning efforts. Attendees rely on Gartner Symposium/ITxpo to gain insight into how their organizations can use technology to address business challenges and improve operational efficiency. For more information, please visit www.gartner.com/symposium/us.
CONTACT:
Laurence Goasduff
Gartner
+44 1784 267 195
laurence.goasduff@gartner.com
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About Gartner:
Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT) delivers the technology-related insight necessary for its clients to make the right decisions, every day. Gartner serves 10,000 organizations, including chief information officers and other senior IT executives in corporations and government agencies, as well as technology companies and the investment community. The Company consists of Gartner Research, Gartner Executive Programs, Gartner Consulting and Gartner Events. Founded in 1979, Gartner is headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, U.S.A., and has 3,700 associates, including 1,200 research analysts and consultants in 75 countries worldwide. For more information, visit www.gartner.com.
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