Gartner Application Strategies & Solutions Summit 2018 November 27 - 29 / Las Vegas, NV

Participants in the Senior Executive Circle are invited to an exclusive breakfast to meet with Gartner host, Melanie Lougee, and to meet and connect with their peers. Registration is required. Seating is limited.

Digital transformation is top of mind of every leader but often forgotten and ignored is the employee. At the heart of every digital transformation journey therein lies the importance of employee engagement. This within an organization is more prevalent than ever as a driver of business performance. The needs of your employees are changing and if you fail to adopt a digital workplace strategy you will fall behind. Successful digital transformation requires a multifaceted digital workplace program approach across people, process, and technology.

Whether your organization is conservative or aggressive in pursuing transformation, you must apply modern digital application and integration strategies to advance. You and your enterprise can and must achieve organizational and thought leadership in order address the challenges of a digital future. Accelerate and guide the transformation toward digital impact.

The impact of AI-enabled software and hardware machines on society and the workplace depends on the trajectories of strong, uncertain forces. We explore four scenarios for the future of work, and offer advice to HR leaders on how to manage the machine-human workforce in each. We also advise HR leaders on what medium-term investments will prepare them and their organizations for the future of work.

Successful application leaders must move from "reacting to change" to "managing change" to “creating change.” Organizational culture what blocks change culture kills projects, programs and careers. Culture change is easier — and more difficult — than you think. Easier because there are techniques that can make it happen. Harder because to lead change you must change yourself. Learn an effective new model for leadership, clarify and articulate your leadership style and help yourself to identify your strengths and weaknesses.

The ability to introduce new solutions into the enterprise is driving unprecedented change in organizations, culture and people. However, keeping pace is proving a challenge for many organizations. Moving to an experimental, agile, learning organization emphasizes the need for must-have change practices and skills needed to help their organizations become more "change fit."

New data & analytics roles are emerging to help organization become more data-driven. Many of these can be adapted from similar roles in other parts of the organization that deal with physical or financial assets, or human capital. In this session you will learn: - What roles and skills are needed to monetize or generate improved economic benefits from information - Who should be involved in helping your organization manage information as an actual asset - Why measuring information's value, as if it were a balance sheet asset, is important and how this should be done.

The perennial worry of CEOs about finding talent with the right skills is still relevant today, but the business context has changed dramatically due to the advent of the digital business. The shift of talent management responsibilities to managers/workers and the inclusion of nonemployees require focus on these roles’ experiences. The need for speed and agility requires continuous evaluation of processes and experimentation on technologies, including AI applications. This workshop provides IT and Application Leaders with a holistic framework for redefinition of Talent processes and technologies to tackle these challenges.

In the war for talent, application leaders are losing. Despite their best efforts to attract a range of diverse talent, many application leaders are failing to meet even their basic staffing goals. Why? In this workshop you will learn how to critically examine job descriptions to eliminate gender bias and create the right incentives to fuel retention and encourage a different kind of inclusive leader.

Join Gartner analyst, Debra Logan, for an informal discussion on creating a more inclusive workplace within our enterprise.

Inclusion becomes a critical success factor for business performance, even in organizations with diverse workforce. A number of technologies can significantly enhance the effectiveness of interventions to diagnose the current state of inclusion, to develop leaders who foster inclusion, and to embed inclusion into daily business execution. This presentation will provide the key technologies to consider and effective ways to synthesize them.

The business benefits of diversity in the workplace are well established, impacting everything from the bottom line to employee satisfaction. Recruiting for diversity is not enough. To realize the benefits of diversity, you must manage for inclusion. How can you make sure all the voices in your team or your organization are heard? How can you maintain diversity of thought and encourage everyone to participate without opening the door to chaos? This session gives you insights into how to include everyone’s point of view and incorporate diverse opinions in your team.

Much energy has been spent by organizations to attract and meet the expectations of the next generation of employees. However far less attention has been devoted to preparing the people who will manage them. The role of the manager is becoming more demanding and complex. This session will explore the new management expectations and ways to meet the demands.

Regulatory privacy requirements are widespread, whether you look at HIPAA, the European Union's GDPR, or at various efforts in Asia, Latin America and even North America (e.g. California's AB375). After thousands of client inquiries, a number of key capabilities for a mature privacy management program have been observed. We will address a few, and use real-life analogies to ensure a proper understanding of who's responsible, and how to attack.

This workshop will walk through and illustrate through actual vendor scenarios how to use financial models as powerful tools when planning and strategizing vendor negotiations. The negotiation scenarios illustrated during the workshop will show how and when to use three different types of financial models and related action items for cost transparency and also to use as negotiation leverage. The workshop exercises will include hands-on activities to apply the following analysis models: TCA (total cost of acquisition), NPV, BAU demand forecasting, and "Make Me Whole" financial equivalency analysis for on-premises to cloud migrations.

To achieve digital business objectives, applications leaders need high-performing delivery teams that can rapidly respond to changing business priorities and continuously deliver high-impact capabilities. But existing organizational silos, competing priorities, and capability gaps hinder their ability to achieve desired outcomes. Highlighting examples from Standard Bank, Hilton, and Intel this session will help you build the environment needed to empower and equip agile teams by aligning around product outcomes, giving greater autonomy for end-to-end delivery activities, and establishing shared customer-centric objectives.

Technical Debt. Nasty stuff. We've all got it. We would rather not have it. But what exactly is it? Where does it come from? And how do you measure it?. Far too many IT organizations are in deep denial about the scale of their Technical Debt problem. This keynote will shine an unrelenting spotlight on the issue, and show how Technical Debt can be defeated.

Join us for a special breakfast with Gartner VP Distinguished Analyst, Doug Laney who will discuss concepts from and answer questions about his recent book, “Infonomics: How to Monetize, Manage and Measure Information as an Asset for Competitive Advantage.”

As an IT leader, your scope has changed. From building back-office and front-office systems, to be in the middle of the digital business. And the next thing is getting clear: the role of your organization in the #digitalsociety. This provocative, fast-paced presentation argues that the Silicon Valley way of creating a better world is short-sighted and misguided. A better understanding of how society works is needed, and every IT leader needs a story here. It is easy to be cynical and “realistic” in today's world, but what we really need is stories of optimism and hope. What will be your story?

To design, drive and disrupt with digital business requires different leadership traits than those forged in the past. The thinking necessary won't happen by chance. To equip teams for future success, application leaders can leverage five practical steps designed to hone digital acuity leadership.

Companies adopting agile development often face financial procedures that assume a project structure and waterfall methodology. Budgeting, time reporting and capitalization processes all change. Share your best practices for solving these problems with you peers.

Future products no longer fit neatly into a single category or have a single method of innovation. CIOs and IT leaders must understand how to blur the lines among team members and extend to suppliers and customers for a truly innovative approach to product life cycle management (PLM). This session will show CIOs how to blur the lines of innovation to expand past traditional boundaries and gain insight from other industries.

Budget constraints remain one of the top challenges facing the digital workplace program's continuous funding and ultimately success. This presentation will enable IT leaders (in DW leader's shoes) in selecting, tracking and communicating relevant metrics (both financial and nonfinancial) to the executive leadership and securing appropriate budgets. It will help IT leaders justify the digital workplace investment to senior management and prevent the perception that it is just an expensive IT initiative. This measurement will be done across four dimensions of financial alignment, IT alignment, people alignment and business alignment and will use a scorecard approach for effective communication. The financial parameters usually resonate best with business leadership, provide a common language and pave the path for further investment. However, the nonfinancial aspects are the real drivers and leading indicators of financial outcomes.

Information is increasingly talked about as a critical asset. But the failure of most organizations to measure it like one, compounded by the accounting profession’s lack of recognizing it as one, has led to information’s widespread mismanagement and impaired economic benefits. However, Gartner’s models for quantifying information’s value have led to significant gains and transformations for organization’s deploying them.

Applications are expensive. They are expensive to acquire in the first instance, and then they are expensive to operate, support, maintain, enhance, extend and integrate. Application Leaders are under pressure to "save money." In order to develop effective cost-containment strategies, it is first necessary to know where the money goes. This tutorial will provide a solid foundation for such an investigation.

More than 50 research analysts have come together to identify ten trends in applications that are changing the way organizations conduct business. In this session, we'll give an overview of the top ten strategic application trends that are intelligent, integrated and innovative.

Your company had its digital vision and strategy and a host of ideas for optimizing or transforming its business. Now you have to build something! This session is based on interviews with operating digital businesses about how they built their technology platform. What technologies did they select and why? How did they govern the process and leverage existing technology platforms? What would they do differently if they were to start over? We'll also look at some of the trends, principles, and architectural practices that are emerging.

High-productivity tooling is moving from departmental to enterprise IT focus and scale. Check out the latest platforms included in the 2018 High-Productivity Application Platform as a Service (hpaPaaS) Magic Quadrant.

This roundtable will cover the best practices for minimizing risk and maximing rewards of open source software investments.

This workshop on how to start an application programming interface (API) program, will focus on choosing the right projects, defining the right APIs and setting up the right project filters/governance basics.

Software is expensive to acquire, but even more expensive to operate, support, maintain and modify. Managing a large, complex, diverse and aging application portfolio to meet all today's operational requirements while simultaneously modifying that portfolio to meet the short, medium and long-term demands of digital business is a herculean task that needs the full engagement of the CIO. This presentation offers practical advice on the three critical disciplines necessary for successful application management.

Application leaders aiming for digital transformation are implementing new operating models for products, APIs and platforms over projects and programs. Success depends on a fast and flexible approach to synchronizing product and platform teams, speeding work for digital dexterity. Attend to learn proven practices for digital product management and demand governance that digital leaders use to maximize digital business results.

There are many approaches to assembling a platform to support your digital business. Participants will share their experiences and decisions on core technologies for integration, orchestration, development platforms, Internet of Things, and APIs/ecosystems. How did they leverage existing platforms and technology investments? What was the role of partners? What vendors can help and what are the cost implications?

Recent events have shown that API security is critical. However, often it is not well understood. There is a tendency to "throw technology at the problem," choosing a standard such as OAuth, but not going further. In this workshop, attendees learn about API security, and collaboratively work on constructing a coherent, effective, API security policy. Deep security expertise is not required.

Application programming interfaces (APIs) are used engage ecosystems, reaching out to business partners and to end users through mobile and new conversational channels. APIs enable business moments and can spark innovative ideas and apps. Running a bimodal API program, publishing APIs securely and taking advantage of the API economy presents a number of challenges to the CIO and IT Leaders. In this session, we explore these issues and solutions.

As applications leaders look to scale agile to increase solutions delivery speed and responsiveness, their organizations are increasingly held back by traditional processes for managing project risk and ensuring value realization. In this session, we’ll describe governance practices that promote rather than impede agile workflows, and provide examples of how leading organizations have upgraded their IT and enterprise governance models for agile.

Traditional models for estimating app development costs do not adequately assess mobile-specific use cases and functions. Application leaders should take an agile project approach to estimate the initial and ongoing costs for modern application development. This workshop will discuss the use of timeboxes, minimum viable products, embracing transparency and a product mindset along with other agile best practices for estimating the cost to develop modern apps.

Digital business transformation requires deep changes to the business model and operating model. What could possibly go wrong? We provide tips that will help application leaders deal with the most common traps in digital business transformation.

Postmodern ERP strategy provides an execution roadmap to implement the building blocks of technology to support the transition to digital business. Vendors are developing platforms to assimilate the high volume of data from digital business, but a means of processing this data into usable information is required. AI technologies can ingest volumes of more complex data, and detect (and predict) patterns with greater speed, accuracy and lower cost than people can — at least in some cases. ERP vendors are already embedding advanced analytics so users can perform sophisticated analysis on transaction data without specialized skills. This will evolve to more sophisticated AI technology used to perform these analyses, and recommend or even make decisions. ERP vendors are already experimenting, and enhancing or adding features based on AI technologies. This will expand to widespread use of AI in ERP. AI can be used not only to augment existing analytics, but also to enhance usability, sometimes in quite dramatic ways. Automated invoices to purchase order reconciliation is a simple example. Conversational interfaces utilizing AI is another more sophisticated use case that vendors are already testing. Recommendations: — Educate yourself on the current state and uses of AI in applications. Scrutinize the use of AI, focusing on exactly how a system "learns" without reprogramming. — Request demonstrations and acquire references because vendors may oversell their AI capabilities in the short term. — Build a small AI center of expertise, staffed with a few experts in the technology who are charged with learning, educating and supporting business decisions on solutions that exploit AI technologies. — Buy rather than build solutions, in most cases, for the next two years. — Avoid anthropomorphizing AI systems — they are powerful tools, but they are still only tools.

It's not Ghost IT or Shadow IT or Rogue IT: It's IT that has all the needs for security and integrity and integration and quality assurance of any other IT. Application leaders need to help the enterprise to develop governance and management policies that embrace business unit applications as well as traditional IT applications. This is not an "Us and Them" problem — this is a "we" problem. But someone has to take ownership of solving the problem.

CIOs need to provide the best support for digital business initiatives with agility and velocity to stay in sync or better, stay ahead. To support this, the IT organization needs to go into a continuous delivery mode. However, existing applications that are part of the value chain can introduce impediments and delays. In this session, we will present best practices on how continuous modernization can cure impediments in old applications and prevent impediments in new applications.

API centers of excellence are being created in order to provide access to data, increase innovation and streamline processes. In this session, we look at examples of API centers of excellence in leading organizations. We also look at some of the key roles created in this team, including the API product manager. Attendees will learn how to effectively manage APIs across the organization and beyond.

Most organizations are in the early stages of their digital transformation. This strategic trend is reflected in the evolving business requirements, IT practices and technology innovation. Application leaders developing their roadmaps to digital business must study the trends in cloud platform technologies to best utilize their new opportunities and avoid new risks. How will the IoT devices and digital twins; APIs and API marketplaces; microservices and serverless functions; hybrid integration and multicloud services; events and streams; analytics and AI, IaaS and PaaS -- support and disrupt your plans, your organization, and your leadership role?

Digital business imposes a lot of stress on your application systems, and application leaders will need to step up their application architecture practices to ensure their applications can support modern agility, resiliency and performance requirements. This session describes essential architectural principles for digital business and presents a maturity model that application leaders can use to evaluate and mature their application architecture discipline.

A core tenet of microservices architecture is that a microservice should own its data. Many data architecture teams balk at the idea of decomposing the database. This point/counterpoint session analyzes arguments from both sides of the aisle and provides advice for building collaboration between dev and data teams.

Evolving digital business requirements for better user experiences and innovation require an architecture that supports agility, flexibility and scalability. A multigrained mesh app and service architecture (MASA) approach centered around mediated APIs and mesh applications provides a highly agile architecture, but is a significant shift from traditional monolithic applications. This session provides a framework for iteratively incorporating MASA principles to increase your architectural agility.

No one application platform can support all your application requirements. You must adopt a hybrid application platform (HAP) strategy to support your needs as you develop a technology platform that enables digital business. This session walks through Gartner's HAP capability framework, which provides guide rails to help you identify the capabilities you need and a means to evaluate your current portfolio of application infrastructure.

Serverless computing is the new hotness in cloud computing. It promises to dramatically cut costs and improve your agility. But is it right for you? Can you move your applications to serverless? If you do, will you gain those promised benefits? Come to this session to get your questions about serverless answered.

Digital twins are a proliferating, high-impact IT innovation that will deliver significant business benefits — such as predictive maintenance of commercial assets — while disrupting existing IT investments — such as application infrastructure, as well as core business applications and data. In this session, we define what digital twins are, and reveal the impact they will have on business and IT.

Software architects have the same goals they've always had — to create software that meets the needs of today while adapting future needs in a cost-effective way. But technical professionals responsible for software architecture must use new technologies, paradigms and practices.

Microservices architecture (MSA) is at the top of the Hype Cycle, but the path to it is far from clear. In this session, delegates will share their experiences with microservices architecture and learn how others are experimenting their way to the right mix of agility and flexibility for their business.

Architects can no longer sit in ivory towers. They must become actively involved in strategic investments that enable digital business transformation. They must develop new skills and practices to guide and influence these investments. This workshop examines practices and attitudes that enable architects to improve their influence.

Microservices are a cloud-native application architecture with many benefits, including delivery flexibility and precision scalability. But many organizations have existing monolithic applications that impede overall development agility. This session provides a clear framework for refactoring the monolith to increase the architectural agility that will allow the development team to extract microservices for cloud deployment in an incremental way.

Explore the top 10 strategic trends over the next five years in application development. We will discuss the influence of each on how IT organizations will build next-generation software solution from the perspectives of people, process and technology considerations. Come learn how you can apply these trends as part of your application development efforts supporting digital transformation.

Our inquiries over the past year have started to shift from asking "should I move from project to products" to "how do I get the organization to change." Regardless of whether you have started or not, many people in the lines of business, executive management and even IT will be uncomfortable or even combative about making the switch. Concerns include funding models, perceived lack of control and losing the iron triangle of scope, time, and cost. This presentation will review the forces necessitating the change, the "what’s in it for me?" arguments for various stakeholders and tactics for helping the change occur.

Design has become a first-level priority for application development. Discuss how design and development resources effectively work together.

Gartner surveys single out culture change as the single biggest barrier when adopting agile. When scaling agile across multiple teams, it's especially necessary to take this into account. How can we make use of cultural theories developed by Maslow, McGregor, Ouchi and others to understand how best to approach this transformational change?

Progressive web apps (PWAs) provide the next evolution in web development capable of supporting capabilities such as offline support and push notifications. They bring us closer to finally deliver on the original promise of web apps: An app that simply downloads and runs whenever and wherever you need it without complex installs and app management. In this roundtable, we'll discuss the opportunities PWAs provide and the challenges they pose for building the next generation of modern web apps.

Immersive technologies are changing the way businesses view typical enterprise processes. Immersive technology increases productivity in the warehouse, adds efficiency to equipment maintenance and repair, optimizes transportation and logistics, expedites employee readiness and ramp up, and creates new and innovative ways to market to customers. All of these areas will be discussed along with real-world use cases and best practices for getting started.

Application leaders face an increasing array of digital channels to support, from apps to chatbots to VPAs. We evaluate the major MADP vendors that are used to accelerate and scale mobile app development, as well as deliver post-app experiences supporting digital business.

Laziness, Impatience and Hubris. Yes, virtues! Larry Wall first coined these three, but they are more applicable than ever for today's IT workers. Great contributors are lazy, in that they build robust solutions that require minimal maintenance and collaborate with others to avoid being a single point of failure. Impatience leads them to find tools that make them more productive and not repeat themselves. And hubris gives them pride in their work, with a strong focus on quality. You can recruit for these virtues and you can cultivate them in-house. • Why on earth would laziness, impatience and hubris be desirable qualities for your employees? • What are some case studies to demonstrate how these qualities result in better solutions? • How can these virtues guide your hiring and how can you cultivate them in-house?

Gartner surveys inform us that CIOs are pouring significant investment into adopting agile frameworks, and bringing enterprise software solutions like Oracle, SAP and Workday into the agile fold is a high priority. This session will explore how to apply agile to implementing enterprise software on premises and in the cloud.

Leading companies build more software themselves, and wield it as a competitive advantage in the market. Trailing performers must change their organizational DNA in order to close the widening gap. Application leaders need to move quickly to alter their development organization's culture, processes, and technologies with new digital DNA—in the form of new thinking, roles, methodologies, tools, and services.

We use APIs every day. The disruptive requirements of digital transformations, their frequent need to build new ecosystems, and the pressing need for application rationalization will continue to deeply change the market for the platform that enables API programs: Full lifecycle API management.

High-productivity development is becoming more prominent and sophisticated and requires efficient testing to ensure quality. Application leaders who are creating strategies for digital business must evaluate and map potential tools against their use cases and technologies — and the skill sets needed to support them — and prepare to acquire more than one test automation tool to address all of them.

Agile is commonplace today, and DevOps is gaining traction quickly. Discuss some of the lessons learned as enterprises adopt and refine these practices. Participates in this session will hear where their peers are on the journey to product teams, the challenges that they are facing and how they might be solved.

Responsive design has become an expected aspect to modern web apps, but it is not enough to satisfy the expectations of today's web users who have higher expectations and require a unified experience across multiple devices. Integrations with IoT devices, conversational interfaces and AI are accelerating these expectations and have pushed mobile web app requirements far past a simple responsive design. In this session, we will explore the different approaches to understanding your mobile users, designing the appropriate workflows and implementing the optimal experience.

Gartner's Magic Quadrant provides standards for market analysis and assessment to support buyers in selecting vendors and services. In this session, we will examine the enterprise agile planning tools market, identify key trends within it, and discuss the vendors appearing in the Magic Quadrant.

Hosted AI Services such as natural language and image recognition services enable the building of apps with capabilities previously unavailable to development teams. These services and deliver apps that are easier to use and less subject to data entry problems. This session will focus on use cases that leverage these AI-driven services to deliver breakthrough apps.

Application leaders are facing increasing pressure from the business to modernize applications and create new web and mobile apps. To meet the surging demand, IT must embrace and encourage citizen development initiatives to democratize app development at scale and velocity. Come learn best practices from your peers.

As businesses are moving to agile and DevOps, organizations must rethink their approach to quality. Testing is no longer a stage in a DevOps delivery but an integral DevOps activity that exists in various forms through all areas. We discuss the cultural and organizational changes required, the best practices needed and the new structure for QA that recognizes the needs and roles of testers but integrates very specific continuous quality practices into the complete DevOps feedback loop.

High-productivity aPaaS (hpaPaaS) is an emerging and disruptive force in application development teams causing them to reconsider their position and value as part of the ever-changing technology landscape in IT. Instead of ignoring this change, organizations need to embrace it and better understand how they can add hpaPaaS to their hybrid application platform toolset. Enterprise application teams have a backlog of features, pent-up demand and business end users being underserved by IT. Application architects should use this assessment to understand when and where hpaPaaS plays a role in expanding IT’s reach, increasing developer productivity and provide self-service for citizen developers.

As DevOps gains popularity for rapid delivery and innovation of new IT-enabled capabilities, concerns about security and compliance increase. Security and risk management leaders must adapt existing security tools, processes and policies to the DevOps toolchain without slowing the development process. Preregistration is required. Seats are limited.

CIOs increasingly deploy agile methodologies to create and deliver IT solutions in their organizations. While continuous delivery can create value for IT and organizations at large, it breaks Information Security’s traditional, "waterfall" approach to risk management. Learn to model successful CIOs who have rethought security governance and delivery for the digital era.

Creating a cloud strategy may seem daunting but needs to be pragmatic. Some basic principles and guidelines are a good beginning rather than attempting all-encompassing IT strategies. We offer some guidance.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the most hyped technologies of 2018. This bootcamp session will cover 1) What is AI? 2) What are the business benefits of AI and 3) How to get started

Price wars, partnerships, acquisitions, co-opetition, along with rampant confusion and cloud washing, are setting the stage for battle for the cloud. While the vendors themselves face significant disruption, enterprise IT strategies continue to depend more and more on cloud and the vendors delivering cloud solutions. We describe how cloud computing is not one thing but how offerings exist on a spectrum and outlines the major cloud strategies of the megavendors (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, etc.) and uses that spectrum to assess the applicability of their approaches to your cloud strategies.

This is a blockchain boot camp session.

By now just about everyone has heard of and has at least an arms-length familiarity with IoT. But not everyone has implemented IoT, so a clear understanding of what this remarkable innovation is -- and the potential value it contributes to business -- is still often mis-understood. In this Boot Camp we'll share the critical few things you need to know about what IoT is -- and its impact on business.

Cloud integration is a reality for many organizations today. Come and learn about the unique challenges cloud integration brings. How does it differ to regular integration and what new tools and practices should be evaluated in meeting this challenge.

Applications can be delivered in a multitenant, shared everything by SaaS providers, but applications can also be delivered to run in a PaaS or even an IaaS environment. Application development targeting cloud deployment has nuances which must be understood, and a lift and shift from on-premises to cloud isn't as easy as it sounds.

Robotic process automation software enables CIOs and application leaders to automate repetitive tasks without requiring disruptive changes to legacy applications. This minimally invasive method is not the silver bullet to a long-term integration and automation strategy for applications and services. It can be used to deliver greater levels of productivity for the business while also proving out which applications and services should be modernized first.

Use of artificial intelligence within integration technologies shows promise, but is at a very early stage. Application leaders must understand how to harness self-adjusting or self-learning AI approaches to equip their enterprises with a highly adaptive integration infrastructure.

PaaS comes in many shapes and sizes. This session provides an overview of PaaS options and their applicability to support different types of applications, different architectural models, and different developer work styles and expectations.

Immersive technologies, such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR), are changing the way organizations view typical business processes and consumer experiences. This boot camp discusses immersive technologies and tips for getting started.

Price wars, partnerships, acquisitions, co-opetition, along with rampant confusion and cloud washing, are setting the stage for battle for the cloud. While the vendors themselves face significant disruption, enterprise IT strategies continue to depend more and more on cloud and the vendors delivering cloud solutions. We describe how cloud computing is not one thing but how offerings exist on a spectrum and outlines the major cloud strategies of the megavendors (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, IBM, etc.) and uses that spectrum to assess the applicability of their approaches to your cloud strategies.

An "unintegrated digital business" is simply an oxymoron. Digitalization does empower organizations to innovate and disrupt, but also entails tackling a daunting array of application, data, APIs, mobile , ecosystems and "things" integration issues. To support these challenges a HIP-based "Integration Business Utility" shared service is becoming a precondition to be in business for organizations of any kind. Key issues: • What are the trends that will lead application leaders to shake-up their integration strategy? • How will application leaders deliver a versatile and cost effective hybrid integration platforms? • How will application leaders provide best-in-class integration services to the business?

Integration is never easy, but adding SaaS and cloud-hosted applications has dramatically increased the challenge. In this session, attendees will share their experiences with integrating on-premises, cloud and SaaS applications.

Though technically apps are integrated, the governance and quality of the business data shared between them is the weak link. Master data management helped a little, but has struggled too. This research explores and explains what a data hub strategy is and how you should introduce it to start to improve the integrity of your business processes. • What are data integration hubs and how do they support data sharing and governance across apps? • How and where to start a data hub strategy? • What are the best approaches to architect and deploy data hubs?

As organizations embrace SaaS and cloud-hosted applications, the complexity of integrations grows dramatically. Choosing the correct integration approach requires an understanding of the relative strengths and weaknesses of four different styles. This session examines these patterns and practical use cases for connecting on-premises, SaaS and cloud hosted applications.

Currently many organization have in place a central ICC that acts as an integration factory, focused on efficiently delivering integration projects for the whole enterprise. But efficiency is not sufficient. We also need agility. The most extreme form of agility is self-service, that is enabling application teams, LoBs, subsidiaries, departments and even individual business users to perform integration by themselves. Under the supervision of an "integration empowerment team," in charge of implementing the HIP, consolidating their best practices into reusable integration templates and governance models and delivering training, support, consulting and help desk capabilities. These capabilities should be made available to integration specialists, «ad hoc» integrators and citizen integrators in a self-service fashion.

Enterprise integration platform as a service (iPaaS) is a second generation, cloud-based application and data integration technology. Ease of use and fitness with digital business needs to connect on-premises, cloud-based and mobile applications and data are driving iPaaS fast adoption. In this session, we discuss how the provider landscape is changing and how you can discern what's the best iPaaS for you.

The proliferation of connected ecosystems, platforms and "things” is fast exceeding human capacity to optimally connect and orchestrate a vast set of integration operations. Application leaders responsible for integration will need to determine how self-adjusting or self-learning artificial intelligence approaches offer new ways and potential to rebalance integration work that a human and machine will do.

CRM and customer experience (CX) deployments found within organizations today continue to increase in number, furthering the fragmentation of customer data. Customer data and application fragmentation significantly impacts the goal of a unified view of a customer. This session will describe a strategy to bridge application and data silos to allow you to come closer to the ever elusive unified view of the customer and provide a great customer experience.

Intelligent robots have captured the attention of CIOs and business leaders — promising the ability to accelerate your digital transformation journey without the cost and complexity of traditional application development approaches. But do they really deliver on this promise? Just how smart are they? This session will help you sort the hype from reality and develop an intelligent enterprise automation strategy.

The business utility-style hybrid integration platform (HIP) is the key technology foundation for pervasive data and application integration delivered as a business utility. A well-designed HIP supports a range of integration requirements, multiple types of users and hybrid delivery models. But building an HIP is challenging as industry experience is limited and providers' offering is still in the making. Key issues: • What is a hybrid integration platform and why must it be "hybrid"? • What will be the technical building blocks than make up a HIP? • How will technology innovations such as IoT, AI, event-processing, blockchain and RPA affect HIP design and implementation?

The goal of this workshop is to provide attendees with a hands-on and engaging introduction to the human-centered design practice of design thinking. The workshop attendees participate in each stage of the design thinking methodology through a practical exercise to gain a true perspective of how a designer’s mindset and methods for creativity can foster breakthrough innovation. Design thinking has gained significant momentum in the marketplace with industry leaders like Airbnb, Uber, SAP, IBM and GE making significant investments in the methodology.

Not all brand experiences are created equal. Finding and resolving CX issues is table stakes. It takes more to build experiences that differentiate and strengthen your brand. Brands that probe their customer understanding and offer proactive experiences earn greater engagement, trust, purchase, satisfaction and loyalty. In this session, you'll learn: • What experiences are most powerful in building customer relationships • How successful brands create proactive experiences • How your brand can measure the benefit of proactive experiences

There was a time when having a second best customer experience was not punished by customers, employees and investors. But in 2018, the organization with the best customer experience is being disproportionately rewarded and the winner takes it all and the loser has to fall. So what are those with the superior customer experiences doing differently, how have they turned their vision into reality and how can you adopt their best practices to also come out on top?

Too many companies believe that the customer journey is the collection of interactions that they have with a customer. They also believe that together these interactions equal a continuous experience for the customer. This couldn't be further from the truth and building plans with this thinking will likely derail well intended personalized engagement efforts. This session explain the real customer journey and how build solutions that fir the journey.

Machine learning tools are increasingly embedded in customer analytics and digital experience platforms. How is your organization using these to improve customer experiences? Use cases include — augmented analytics, segmentation, personalization, customer journey orchestration and more. Do you use off the shelf embedded products? More importantly, is your organization seeing the benefits of these technologies or do they still need to be proven useful?

Organizations are leveraging emerging technologies and experiences for reaching their customers, and employees, at the point of decision. This session will discuss applying design methodologies and processes designed to deliver successful deployments for these unique user experiences such as chatbots, virtual reality and voice.

Customer analytics is not just about providing value to your organization, it's also about creating valuable experiences for your customers. Customer analytics is a key investment underlying customer experience (CX) excellence, now a strategic imperative for many organizations. This session will outline the business benefits of customer analytics and how to develop a roadmap to CX improvements.

The Gartner CIO survey tells us that top performing organizations embrace design and UX competencies more than the average company. Learn how your organization compares to other enterprises when it comes to UX investments, and how application leaders can embrace and prioritize design practices as part of the software development life cycle.

Gartner's "Magic Quadrant for Digital Experience Platforms" marks the maturation of a long evolving category. DXPs strive to support organizations as they move from websites to omnichannel digital experiences. This session will explain the drivers and trajectory of this market to help IT Leaders develop roadmaps and migration plans.

Every organization Gartner talks with wants to make agile concepts deliver great results — and many have had some early successes. Now, enterprises want to scale that out — out of IT to the business and out of a small group to a wider scope. This session will show how enterprises scale digital design and how to lead this effort: 1) What are illustrative cases of scaled practice and scope? 2) Who is doing what work and where do people report? 3) What are the best practices to leverage and pitfalls to avoid?

In the emerging space of customer journey analytics and orchestration, what are the use cases for implementing either custom built or off-the-shelf solutions. In this session we will cover: - Piecing together multiple data sources to create a 360 degree view of customer interactions with multiple touch points - Using augmented analytics and ML tools to validate assumed customer journeys or discover unexpected ones, - Defining and executing the optimal customer journey orchestration

The noise around the "framework of the month" is deafening. Increased demands of agility and scalability require new approaches to application architecture and tooling. Hundreds of vendors offer new platforms that promise developer productivity. HTML5 and JavaScript features offer extreme leverage of both code and skills to solve problems for any endpoint device or server environment. How can architects and developers make sense of this turbulent landscape? This session gives a rundown of the trends you cannot afford to ignore in web platforms, frameworks and architecture.

Progressive web apps (PWAs) aim to disrupt the mobile app paradigm by bridging the web experience with native app functionality. Application development leaders must determine when — not if — they need to factor in PWAs as part of their overall mobile and web development strategy. This session will help you learn what it takes to deliver PWAs and how to apply them for your digital business.

This will be a theater session on the 2018 Customer Engagement Center Magic Quadrant. In this highly interactive session, attendees will have the opportunity to question Gartner about the assumptions and analysis that support our positions on the vendors that supply customer service and support software for the contact center. We emphasize the emerging enterprise requirements for AI-driven applications, conversational interfaces and mobile-/customer-first process design.

This session will look at how organizations should use AI-enabled tools to create smarter marketing, customer support and sales experiences and thus supercharge the customer journey of the future. We will explore the importance of using AI and conversational platforms to create the customer experience of the future, and we will show how to leverage AI tools to differentiate yourself and future-proof yourself in a world of hyperintelligent customer services and sales applications.

The collaboration market is full of choices from established and emerging vendors. This session will discuss inquiry trends on collaboration and community vendors like Slack, Microsoft Teams and Workplace by Facebook. Participants can join a general conversation on rationalizing collaboration tools, common use cases, concerns, risks and potential value.

In this session, we will share compelling IoT use cases and customer references, as well as some recent high-impact Gartner IoT predictions and key findings from our annual survey companies that have implemented IoT. IT Leaders will be able to use the insights and lessons learned from these emerging real-world IoT implementations and predictions to help prioritize their investments in IoT technologies and IT competencies needed to help improve the success of their own IoT projects.

Virtual customer assistants and chatbots are brand representatives for your company, whether they are supporting employees or servicing customers. There are pitfalls to be avoided and considerations that are not immediately apparent when building them. This session will focus on the best practices that must be considered when building conversational solutions to ensure positive engagement with employees and customers.

High-performing team networks are a building block for the digital workplace. Improving how teams communicate and coordinate in the flow of work, guided by bots, advanced analytics, and AI can improve decision-making, performance, and achievement of business goals. This session provides an overview of team collaboration trends with a focus on use cases that highlight technology options from various vendors and companies.

Digital experience platforms (DXPs) are a critical component to your digital platform strategies. DXPs provide a wide variety of digital experiences to a wide array of audiences. They not only deliver the current popular digital capabilities of web and mobile, but also provide a platform that will extend digital experiences to the next generation of channels, devices and modalities, including wearables, conversational AI (chatbots, Amazon Alexa, Google Home), augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and a long list of IoT and other connected technologies.

Digital workplace leaders apply customer experience practices and technologies to their employee portals. Digital experience platforms embrace the new principles and unify outmoded systems built for the web era. This session will examine this new category and its successful adoption in the digital workplace.

In the third annual Gartner IoT Implementation Survey we asked over 500 companies worldwide to share their hard earned lessons and insights from IoT implementations. We asked for commercial insights, e.g., did they meet, exceed — or fail to achieve — desired business outcomes? We asked for technical insights, e.g., did they implement digital twins — and if so, how many? Come to learn more about what IoT success — and failure — looks like!

Organizations tend to feel they're behind their cohort in using artificial intelligence, but that's true for far fewer that they'd think. Strategic thinking about AI is fundamental to employing it, but a strategy itself remains elusive for many organizations. Some don't need one, and some can get started. Find out which you are and how best to proceed.

This workshop illustrates through hands on activities how to use eight steps for planning negotiations with major vendors — megavendors, and new and emerging software and cloud vendors. These steps can and should be used for any major negotiation to ensure the right questions are asked and the right detail is revealed to analyze proposals from a cost optimization and risk-mitigation standpoint. They focus on engaging the right IT and business stakeholders to identify requirements and then using stakeholders as part of the negotiation plan and strategy to optimize these deals to optimize and balance cost, value and risk. Workshop attendees will receive ready-to-use checklists, templates, and matrices to execute these eight steps effectively in their organizations.

For too many companies “doing Scrum” is assumed to be enough to be agile. In this presentation, we will explore the fact that Scrum is not (necessarily) agile. It will also cover how Scrum, DevOps and other practices can be used to build a truly agile IT organization.

While blockchain is very popular and organizations are increasingly looking for ways to leverage the technology, recent developments in cryptocurrency have shown that there are unacknowledged security risks. We sound a cautionary note about blockchain, highlight some of those risks, and discuss common security steps organizations must utilize to protect their investment and set their expectations. Attendees should come prepared to ask questions. Available to end users only. Preregistration is required. Seats are limited.

APIs are ubiquitous and mainstream ways enable to access enterprise data hosted in “system of record" applications. Implementing these APIs. however, may imply intractably complex integration challenges and may impose intolerable additional workload on the systems of record. The digital integration hub (DIH) is an emerging architecture that addresses these issues by aggregating multiple back-end data sources into a low-latency, scale-out consolidated data store that serves the API layer. This presentation introduces the notion of DIH, discusses its benefits and drawbacks and provides practical advice on how to implement a DIH to support your API strategy.

In the digital workplace, the most digitally dexterous employees will thrive — citizen developers, integrators, data scientists and other citizen X practitioners that augment IT. Learn how digital workplace leaders can cultivate talent, encourage practices and promote enabling technologies for citizen X.

Digital workers want to work at home ... and in the office. They use laptops ... and desktops, phones and tablets. They love their personal software ... and they use it at work. No single worker archetype defines all your workers, and roles are not enough to understand their diversity, mobility and needs. Discover the five kinds of digital workers and how to make their workplace successful.

This workshop will demonstrate through hands-on activities the importance of understanding that one negotiation process doesn't fit all vendors. The content, action items, and activities will provide a set of four steps that must be followed and tailored for each megavendor to effectively plan for and negotiate the optimal deal. These steps focus on the "tailoring" element for each of the big four megavendors and provide ready to use checklists, templates, toolkits and tips, tactics and tricks to plan for and negotiate these deals for cost optimization and risk mitigation.

The digital business era is underway, and we face the most technologically diverse ecosystem ever. Confronted by a dizzying array of choices surrounding cloud computing, big data, IoT, DevOps, analytics, and more, technical professionals must come to grips with the fact that the breakneck pace of technology evolution will continue to accelerate. Through all of this complexity and change emerges three simple principles you can apply to architect your digital future.

API management has traditionally focused on the monolithic gateway in the DMZ. But, next-generation APIs are increasingly built using microservices, may be event-driven not request/response, and might span on-premises and cloud. In this session, we examine how modern API infrastructure can be governed and secured. We will explain what tools and technologies are available to address this requirement.

Application leaders that choose to improve both their algorithmic and visualization capabilities will find more success. The augmented analytics trend that automates most analytic tasks with machine learning algorithms will greatly increase the ability to find analytic insights in the data, but visualization is still required to tell the story and create buy in to the new findings. Attendees will understand the key data science techniques driving the most value for application leaders.

As managed services and professional services become less distinct in the cloud era, cloud managed service providers are positioning themselves as holistic solution vendors for cloud-based applications. From application management to managed development environments to turnkey projects, learn how cloud MSPs can bring more value to the table in contributing to your overall application strategy.

Is your organization struggling with delivering mobile apps, or are not getting the results you expected from mobile app usage? Are you wondering if you should reallocate your budget and resources to new digital experiences, such as chatbots, voice apps, AR, VR, MR or PWA? Bring your questions and hear from your peers to discuss whether a multiexperience strategy is right for you.

To reach the potential of the digital business, your organization and its technology network must become contextual, real-time, responsive, agile and capable of elastic scale. In this presentation, learn how event-driven computing helps advance your organization to these objectives. Learn how business event thinking can improve the customer experience, developers' agility, and operational efficiency for your organization and create a new synergy in the outcomes of your business and IT.

In the midst of digital business transformation, future success will depend on organizations' abilities to adjust to new customer-centric business models. CIOs and application leaders must strive to anticipate future customer and business expectations by adopting scenario-based planning. This presentation explore four planning scenarios describing four types of customer-centric organizations and key technology investments assisting them on their path to success.