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Conference Updates

December 8, 2020

Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference: Day 2 Highlights

We are bringing you news and highlights from the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference, taking place this week virtually in the Americas and EMEA. 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 from the conference, we are highlighting the art of crisis culture hacking, how automation drives infrastructure and operations (I&O) success, and the top I&O cost optimization ideas during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Be sure to check this page throughout the day for updates.

Key Announcements

Press releases and stories covering news from Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies conference are listed below:

Gartner Keynote: Crisis Culture Hacking — How to Keep Your Employees Sane Over the Long Haul

Presented by Katherine Lord, VP Analyst, Gartner

I&O leaders are being asked to rally employees to carry their teams through perhaps the most challenging business conditions they have ever encountered. In this environment, Katherine Lord, VP Analyst at Gartner and Conference Co-Chair, explained how leaders can use crisis culture hacking to keep employees positive and motivated.  

Key Takeaways

  • “The state of constant discomfort and accelerating change that COVID-19 has brought is causing transformation fatigue among people.”

  • “Strike a balance between transformation and change fatigue via culture hacks - small, iterative and impactful ways to reshape employee behaviors and drive large-scale initiatives.”

  • “A culture hack is ALIVE - actionable, low effort, immediate, visible, emotional.”

  • “Find out where the organization is vulnerable and exploit that. It might be in how weekly team meetings are run or how infrastructure teams are incentivized.”

  • “Hack for pride, agency, hope or belonging. During uncertainty, this goes a long way.”

  • “There is not a lot of capacity now for big, difficult change. Instead lead with clarity, confidence and compassion.”

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Success with Automation Drives I&O Success

Presented by Milind Govekar, Distinguished VP Analyst, Gartner

The benefits of automation are profound and will be exceedingly important post-pandemic. In this session, Milind Govekar, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner, outlined some of the trends and best practices needed to scale automation and drive business agility.

Key Takeaways

  • “Adopting automation in the post-pandemic world will lower costs, improve quality, deliver innovation and augment capabilities of I&O staff.”

  • “The top five processes attracting automation investments are 1) provisioning 2) testing 3) monitoring 4) end-user computing and, 5) configuration management.”

  • “While some jobs might be lost to automation, others will be created.”

  • “CEOs want to accelerate digital transformation. That acceleration is underpinned by automation.”

  • “Automation will be needed to mitigate the uncertainty caused by the pandemic, enabling resilience and adaptability - safety.”

  • “I&O will need automation to help put organizations on the path to recovery and renewal, from cost optimization to driving digital capabilities for growth.” 

  • “The three parts of an automation strategy are skills and culture, processes and practices, and tools and technology - in this order.”

Top I&O Cost-Optimization Ideas

Presented by Jonathan Forest, Senior Director Analyst, Gartner

I&O leaders are always looking for ways to operate more efficiently, and cost optimization is at the core of that. Jonathan Forest, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, shared some areas across I&O to evaluate for potential cost optimization efforts and discussed ways to make this an ongoing process. 

Key Takeaways

  • “Long term, there’s still a systemic pressure on IT budgets to reduce spending as a function of revenue. In fact, 50% of boards of directors want to do that.”
  • “Outsourcing printing to a managed print services vendor is increasingly an option. Let them take over and look at your print server infrastructure — is it rightsized?”

  • “If you can do it faster, that means you can do more things in a certain period of time which drives down costs.”

  • “With SD-WAN you can get better application performance, better resiliency and more agility and flexibility, and if you manage the network yourself there’s much more efficiency.”

  • “Upwards of 80% of organizations over budget on their cloud infrastructure. That’s where cloud optimization tools can help.”

  • “53% of organizations state automation is an approach to achieve cost optimization.”

  • “Good enough is good enough. Don’t have the urge to spend double just because it’s something that you want.”

Join us tomorrow for Day 3 Highlights coming out of the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference 2020

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