Gartner CIO Leadership Forum 2019 March 10 - 12 / Phoenix, AZ

In executive circles, the future has a bad rep. An entertaining futurist on stage at a conference is nice, but there is no clear business case for futuristic thinking and there is more than enough transformation on our plate today already. Oh, and let’s not even consider yesterday’s maintenance. But these are pitfalls, and they should be avoided. Thinking about the future teaches you about today. About how to cope with volatility, today. About catching what drives the market, today. About what makes you unique, today. Join this fast-pace and provocative keynote to take the lead and create the future.

Most enterprises are pursuing only a subset of the actions required to ensure their business model is ready for the digital future. The actions required are: digitalizing your existing model, pursuing new models, leveraging digital ecosystems, and participating in industry-wide initiatives (e.g. consortia). Does your enterprise need to pursue all of these? Find out in this session.

CIOs are often pressured by their boards and executive teams to increase value, optimize spend and tell a strategic story about modernization. This session will share a case study and benchmark data of a CIO who successfully communicated to leadership about continuously accelerating innovation, rationalizing applications and quantifying technology risk. Participants will have the opportunity to preview Gartner’s new interactive decision models, and to suggest additional analyses to help accelerate modernization.

Despite clear demand and backing from the CEO, CIOs still struggle to start their innovation journey and gain measurable traction on the ground. And when they do, their path can be littered with hazards and pitfalls that need to be avoided. This session will provide some practical techniques for CIOs to help them begin their innovation initiatives and avoid some of the common inception missteps.

In today’s digital world, CIOs have to address multiple challenges related to risk and security. It’s a board-level issue that the CIO often does not entirely control. Emerging technology risk groups, governance processes outside of IT, compliance requirements and cultural disconnect problems are just a short list. At this session, get your questions answered and bring the risk and security monster under control!

Business ecosystems have been a major focus of many industry enterprises. Ecosystems offer the opportunity to develop new products and services, gain technical capabilities and skills, and achieve new growth. What is the reality of these models? Are there shining lights in different markets that reshape industry boundaries and add to the industry fluidity. What can organizations learn from these models in developing their own propositions.

As enterprises both prepare for and scale their digital business strategies, the organization itself changes. Gartner gets asked questions about how to organize for digital business, what skills are needed, and how to change the culture. Yet, there is so much more about how the organization works that needs to be part of the planning and strategy. This spotlight session will share upcoming research on the breadth of organizational building blocks required.

Even in a world that is constantly changing, you can prepare your organization to proactively deliver what's next — continuously. You are leading your enterprise through culture change and digital innovation while shifting to a product delivery structure. In this keynote, we will explore various product models and the business outcomes they support, with an integrated view of technology that builds and sustains momentum for your enterprise.

Our brand new global CEO and senior business executive survey reveals what business leaders are focused on in 2019 and 2020. These early trend signals will help CIOs think about how the agenda for IT and digital will change. We will give important high level advice on what to do in response so you can get ahead of the game in your own business.

Digitalized products and services must be improved almost continuously. This fundamental shift requires organizations to break free from an industrial-era design that assumed stability and infrequent, periodic change. Progressive CIOs can maximize value by helping their executive teams rebuild the corporate engine, around a capability that combines continuous value innovation with rapid scaling.

A key aspect of the increasingly important global digital narrative is the role of digital dragons. These organizations, like Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent (BAT), and Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple (GAFA), have digital-first cultures, are digital employers of choice, have highly scalable services, data mastery, deep pockets, evolving platforms and ecosystems with powerful capabilities. They have increasing ambition that crosses and blurs industry boundaries. How should traditional companies and governments think about them, plan with them in mind, and choose whether and how to use, compete, partner or ignore them?

Join us for an exclusive lunch with your direct peers from Global Enterprises (those with annual revenue of greater than $10B), along with a guest speaker.

Digital dexterity is the desire and ability to use technology to drive business outcomes. While relative to peers and competitors, it is linked to the value derived from digital initiatives, and the speed to launch and complete digital initiatives. Join this Roundtable to share your thoughts and hear those of your peers about how to nurture digital dexterity in large organizations to accelerate digital transformation. This Roundtable is designed exclusively for CIO’s from global enterprises with $10 billion or more annual revenue.

A special focus on AI-related findings from the most recent CIO survey (in the main presentation, we skim this topic). The data shows that companies are gaining confidence and experience with machine learning and AI through real use cases. We will explore in depth these cases and their business results, using new interview and client data.

Digital transformation requires application architects and developers to constantly evolve and embrace new skills as well as strengthen existing ones. Use this session to identify the skills like agile architecture, AI, ML, multiexperience design and modernization that will enable you to deliver solutions that are relevant and effective.

There is no such thing as perfect security. If you can’t promise to keep your executives off the front pages after a hack, you can offer them defensibility with key stakeholders such as customers, shareholders and regulators that you were spending the right money on the right priorities. And that you had created the right balance between the needs to protect and the needs to run the business.

Midsize enterprise IT organizations are expected to meet new and fast-changing demands from business partners with limited set of resources at their disposal. It’s impossible to respond to every request. Accordingly, Canada Goose, a midsize company, recognized the power of shared accountability, rapid prototyping, and vendor trial periods. See how Canada Goose works with business partners and vendors to experiment with emerging technologies and reduce implementation timelines within their organization.

Despite the inexorable march toward cloud computing, organizations haven't considered cloud platforms to be at the forefront for data and analytics workload deployment. Use this session to understand how ready new offerings from Google, Microsoft and others are to host your production data analytics pipelines.

The extent to which digital is disrupting the boundaries of business is blurring and changing the distribution of technology leadership roles. What will the distribution of technology leadership in 2025 look like? What are the drivers of these changes? Join me to explore this in-progress research project and shape the questions you would like to see answered.

To address the challenge of ContinuousNext, evolve cybersecurity from project to product management, create business facing security services, and treat cybersecurity as a business function. Address the continuing cultural challenges of taking a risk-based approach by nudging your organization through better customer experience to build a ContinuousNext cybersecurity program.

Digital business is driven by innovation and non-linear thinking. Based on cases from the 2019 CIO Agenda, this session will present lessons learned and best practices from the start-up of internal disruption units.

Teams are the new organization models in the digital age and everything is different. Without great teams you can’t deliver new value at scale. This session provides CIOs with the key formula Google uses to produce great teams and teamwork.

Turn your AI approach on its head. CIOs should be getting guidance on AI from the most senior leadership, not from technologists. How AI is employed is a proactive decision to be made by these leaders- as it affects brand, compliance and financials. This session gives the CIOs the language and frameworks to help business executives describe how AI should be utilized by the enterprise.

To successfully fund innovation and digital business initiatives, CIOs should partner with CFOs to optimize both enterprise IT and business costs. This requires CIOs to first demonstrate capabilities in how to effectively manage IT costs, and then partner with CFOs to leverage technology to optimize cost across the enterprise.

ContinuousNext is a mindset that accepts and embraces perpetual change. Leadership for ContinuousNext requires CIOs to adopt a deliberate leadership approach: shape, shift and share. CIOs can influence culture and change the organization’s mindsets and practices by shaping the new culture deliberately, shifting leadership responsibility to employees, and sharing the new culture widely. We will help you get started with some culture hacks.

Governance gives your strategy traction, so that it can be executed effectively. If executives aren't making the best decisions, CIOs have to figure out why and fix it. But top-down governance redesign is boring and cumbersome. This session will discuss an approach to debugging governance decisions one-by-one so you can tweak and evolve your governance.

CIOs make critical decisions every day — decisions that impact the viability and success of the organization, and the quality of life of the people who work there. Make those decisions count by understanding how to frame and evaluate your options using proven frameworks for every type of decision.

In any professional role some introspection and personal development is a good idea, but particularly for CIOs — because the role is changing and evolving. This year’s list of personal professional development ideas centres on a culture shifting theme. Most organizations are no longer struggling to get started with digital business — they are finding it difficult to scale. Challenging economic conditions could make progress harder. Both CIOs and CEOs tell us cultural barriers are the toughest hurdles. So as a CIO, you need to work on your own ability to think differently and catalyse and lead cultural change.

In this interactive discussion we will share leadership practices that have helped your organization change. To thrive in the era of ContinuousNext, leaders must examine their own mindsets and practices, and realize how they help or inhibit an organization’s ability to change. Read Gartner’s ESCAPE model as background to attend the session.

To adapt to change and embrace emerging opportunities, CIOs need teams that reflect the diversity of the stakeholders and customers they work with, and have an inclusive environment where all team members are comfortable collaborating and sharing their points of view. This session will review practical examples of how CIOs are using diversity and inclusion initiatives to give themselves an advantage as they shift to ContinuousNext.

In the bright heat of Digital Business, executives want to have conversations about new and innovative uses of IT that will help them achieve strategic objectives. Great, go ahead and have those conversations. But when legacy and technical debt are impeding progress, it is necessary to have a more awkward conversation as well. No CIO will enjoy raising these challenging topics — but legacy doesn’t fix itself.

Workplaces are overwhelmingly populated by human beings now, but within a few years augmented intelligence may change circumstances drastically. This presentation examines four scenarios for human-machine interactions in the workplace, with recommendations for managers and executives.

Most CEOs are excellent problem solvers, but too often CIO’s seek approval rather than enable their CEO’s to participate in the decision making process. This causes disengagement, and is at the root of many of the challenges CIOs and IT leaders face. CIO’s need to use different tools to get their CEO to the table and keep them engaged so that they value the outcome of the decisions we ask for.

“I’m not interested in a culture of innovation,” said no one in business ever. Everyone knows that a culture of innovation is necessary and desirable, especially in these days of digital disruption. But how do you actually create one? This session provides CIOs with a step-by-step guide on how to create a culture that nurtures and encourages innovation and creativity. It includes a roadmap of activities and tactics to get from where you are to innovation greatness.

Come ready to identify your culture hack! In this session we will share some ideas with you and foster an interactive discussion where we can collect ideas that are ready for you to try.

Hyper-personalization has amplified customer expectations of dynamic customer-centric experiences across products, services, and ecosystems. CIOs have delivered these personalization capabilities as part of their digital initiatives, but now face a critical obstacle: Talent. CIOs must transform their organizations into workforce talent factory by hyper-personalizing the associate experience as well as the customer experience.

Talent is a key enabler of the enterprise's I&T operating model. CIOs must ensure the enterprise has the roles, skills and competencies required to enable the I&T operating model and execute the business strategy. This session presents what I&T talent and workforce capabilities are needed for each I&T operating model pattern, and provides CIOs with guidance to prepare the organization for the evolution.

Change aversion stymies transformation more than any other factor. However most change programs do not get to problem’s heart — how mindsets invisibly shape our responses to change. CIOs can take small steps that shift culture to unlock "growth mindsets" and accelerate change.

Many CIOs believe that the culture they have today is not what they need moving forward. Because changing culture is difficult and time consuming, CIOs must understand and work through the barriers to culture change that exist in their organization. This session will review research on the barriers and strategies to work through them.

Getting the work done in a digital business depends on new work structures and methods. While most CIOs have implemented agile and are moving to DevOps, most have not yet scaled the product management discipline to achieve effective strategy execution. When they do, they realize everything changes from funding to talent to governance and prioritization. In short, their I&T operating model and likely their enterprise operating model must change. This session advises CIOs how to implement and scale product management, with a lens on transforming their operating model to achieve their digital ambition.

Product management in IT or in collaboration with others in the rest of the business can drive ContinuousNext by balancing fast, flexible support for digital business with the benefits of central control. But it often fails due to role confusion, talent gaps, stakeholder skepticism and misaligned budgets. We’ll show how CIOs at Monsanto, Cisco, and Hilton address these issues to make product management a success.

More than half of IT organizations have shifted some, if not all, of their application development to agile methods. The majority are also from a project- to product-centric delivery model. However, many CIOs have failed to ensure that effective governance and financial management practices have been changed to accommodate a new delivery model that is much faster and needed to support a digitally enabled business that drives additional value. Although best practices are just emerging, this sessions discuses some of the current successful trends as well as pitfalls to avoid.

Operating a product-centric model requires continous alignment between value streams, value delivery and enterprise goals. This session will address how CIOs can solidify their leadership by adopting an adaptive governance approach that drives coherence for delivering business outcomes on both the product and enterprise levels.

CIOs who aspire to move to a different executive role must follow the path of those who previously made the leap. Based on interviews with fifteen leaders who made such a leap, we offer practical advice they shared on what served them well. CIOs should generate revenue, run a P&L like investors are watching and pivot their personal brand toward business. Learn how they did it.

Few enterprises are questioning the need to have a digital design capability. The challenge facing CIOs is how to hire and retain digital design staff, where to fit these people within their department (or departments other than IT) and how to manage handoffs between teams — particularly in conjunction with agile development. This presentation will go through the most common patterns Gartner has seen in both public and private sector enterprises. We will explore the pros and cons of each approach to help CIOs in finding the approach that works best for their specific environment.

Effective IT financial management requires more than just managing the budget. This session allows you to discuss what best practices you can leverage to further optimize both cost and value.

The transition from projects to products is one of the most challenging transformations that IT and business have ever attempted. Products hold out the promise of continuous innovation and improvement, delivered at velocity. But getting there will involve the development of new skills and competencies, embedded in roles that have little precedent in traditional project-driven IT organizations. This presentation shares research findings and best practice to guide the CIO through this transition.

To succeed in digital business, organizations need a strategy that provides clarity about long-term direction while remaining flexible enough to deal with the dynamic and rapidly changing environment in which they operate. This requires a new approach to how strategy is created, reviewed and updated. This session will provide CIOs with practical tools and techniques for developing strategy in the fast-paced and uncertain digital era.

Most public sector and commercial enterprises have been renovating their core in order to create a foundation for the digital business technology platform. To fully realize the benefits of the platform, it is vital that they not think of the platform as a one-time exercise or project. This session details how CIOs and their teams should combine product management discipline with continuous delivery of incremental value to the technology platform. This will provide a foundation to continuously innovate customer experiences, product/services, and business capabilities — a vital necessity in the digital world.

Join us for an exclusive lunch with your direct peers from Global Enterprises (those with annual revenues of greater than $10B), along with a guest speaker.