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Conference Updates

November 24, 2020

Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo India: Day 2 Highlights

We are bringing you news and highlights from Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo, taking place this week virtually in India. Below is a collection of the key announcements and insights coming out of the conference. You can read the highlights from Day 1 here.

On Day 2 of the conference, we are highlighting the key results from the Gartner 2021 CIO Agenda survey, and sessions on the key strategies to help CIOs and IT leaders plan during an unknowable future, and how to use multicloud to optimize costs and manage risks. Be sure to check this page throughout the day for updates.

Key Announcements

Signature Series: 2021 CIO Agenda: Rebuilding the Future

Presented by Andy Rowsell-Jones, Distinguished VP Analyst, Gartner

COVID-19 is a human and public health tragedy with ongoing economic repercussions for all leaders. The question for CIOs and IT executives quickly became: How do I enable my enterprises to rebuild and reset their course after disruptions brought on by the pandemic? In his session, Andy Rowsell-Jones, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner, walked attendees through the results of the annual 2021 CIO Agenda survey.

Key Takeaways

  • “Nothing, yet everything, has changed for the CIO since the onset of COVID-19.”
  • “Top performing enterprises are prioritizing digital Innovation and will come out of the pandemic stronger than their typical and trailing performing counterparts.”
  • “The 2021 Gartner CIO Agenda survey revealed 4 ways CIOs can make a difference in digital business acceleration and in long-term agility: 1) win differently, 2) unleash force multipliers, 3) banish drags and 4) redirect resources.”
  • “As new attack surfaces appear due to the shift to remote work, CIOs reported prioritizing investments in cybersecurity primarily, followed by business intelligence/analytics and cloud services.” 
  • “In 2021, CIOs must build on the momentum they created for their enterprises. The better CIOs perform for the business, the more the business will ask of them next year.”

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Planning for an Unknowable Future: Common Mistakes and Practical Solutions

Presented by Jackie Fenn, Distinguished VP Analyst, Gartner

As leaders construct their organization’s future, they must make assumptions and predictions about how the world will be different from today — but it can be challenging to plan for the unknowable. In her session, Jackie Fenn, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner, discussed specific techniques for CIOs and IT leaders to anticipate and own the future scenarios that they can and cannot control.

Key Takeaways

  • “Humans are generally very good at predicting what is going to happen. But it turns out, when we are wrong about the future, we’re wrong in predictable ways.”
  • “Many of the assumptions we make are usually right. We think that the future will be like today, and most of the time it is.”
  • “For the things you can control, you want to own them. And that starts, as always, by being explicit and deliberate about your goals and aspirations.”
  • “An important part of thinking about the future is to question your assumptions. Check for overconfidence, and to counter the optimism bias, make sure you know the odds of achieving your goal—and you want to achieve it anyways.”
  • “Techniques like scenario planning, contingency planning, options and spread bets can help to identify a range of possible futures, rather than focusing on the ones we’re hoping for.”
  • “Increasing your organizational resilience is not about the accuracy of a single bet, but the ability to maintain as many different bets as long as possible, to ease that stress of uncertainty.”

Optimizing Costs and Managing Risks by Embracing a Multicloud Adoption Model

Presented by Sid Nag, VP Analyst, Gartner

Organizations are turning to more than one cloud provider for their IT services needs due to their desire to optimize costs and spread risks. Sid Nag, Vice President Analyst at Gartner, discussed how IT leaders can manage their spend while reducing their risks by adopting a multicloud model.

Key Takeaways

  • “Organizations are no longer considering a single cloud service provider, 76% organizations prefer a multicloud approach.”

  • Multicloud combines the capabilities of multiple cloud offerings, and it provides a cloud solution that is bigger and better than the sum of its parts.

  • “There are three important use cases for multicloud: 1) Multisourcing 2) Workload Driven 3) Service Brokerage.”  

  • “To reduce risks, IT leaders can leverage the multicloud service model by adopting some of the best practices, such as: Use a governance framework, use cloud-native capabilities, adopt a developer-centric view of tools and follow unified management per function.”

  • “To deploy a multicloud strategy successfully, IT leaders need to start by first identifying their multicloud requirements, identify the areas of risks and apply multicloud principles to mitigate these risks and save costs.”
View coverage from Day 1
View coverage from Day 3

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Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT) delivers actionable, objective insight to executives and their teams. Our expert guidance and tools enable faster, smarter decisions and stronger performance on an organization’s mission-critical priorities. To learn more, visit gartner.com.

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