Key Takeaways

• “Your mission in I&O can be summarized in three goals: 1) work hard to retain talent and staff; 2) seek out new talent where you may find it and 3) support and nurture talent beyond an environment where they can grow and evolve.”

• “Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is fundamental to an adaptive organization.”

• “Organizations in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity are 36% more likely to have financial returns above their industry medians.”

• “Talent availability is the most significant adoption barrier to 64% of emerging technologies.”

• “Building seamless integration can be a struggle. I&O leaders must be building towards having APIs everywhere. Any system that stores or processes data for your organization has a comprehensive, robust and well-documented API.”

• “As an I&O leader you must be aggressive in making automation a first class-discipline in everything that you do.”

• “I&O must evolve to adaptive operations. Adaptive operations bring together your talent and your platforms in multiple new ways, to support constant business change.”

• “I&O leaders will have to learn to work towards adaptive operations, to focus on multiple business models, by automating everything to create efficiency while prioritizing elasticity.”

  Learn more from the Gartner Opening Keynote in the associated Gartner press release. 

Key Takeaways

• Just-in-time infrastructure: Putting the right infrastructure in the right place - colocation, data center, at the edge and more - is just as important as how quickly the infrastructure can be deployed.

• Digital natives: There is an opportunity for traditional I&O organizations to lead with innovation and leverage their digital-native counterparts that thrived during the pandemic to also produce highly agile and competitive offerings.

• Management confluence: I&O is increasingly moving toward integration and operations, or how all of the required management capabilities, such as ITSM or AIOps, can be brought together in a single tool to drive agility. This also drives the need for composable technologies.

• Data proliferation: Data is going to continue to multiply in variety, velocity and volume, and the onus is put on I&O to support its storage and access.

• Business acumen: I&O leaders are guiding their functions through a rapidly changing and distributed technology environment, driving the need for new I&O hires to have less of a technical background and more of a business-based mindset.  
• Career leaders to career lattices: Similar to the business acumen trend, I&O is moving away from single domain career paths driven by workloads and legacy technical skills, and more toward learning agility and cross-domain expertise.

Key Takeaways

• “The average cost of your service desk is 5% of your IT budget.”

• “Every time you handle an incident it costs you $18.80.”

• There are three areas of focus to reduce the impact of incidents:

• #1: Use AI and automation to reduce impact

  • Introduce AIOps that proactively identify and resolve incidents.

• #2: Focus on IT Service Management good practice

  • Make the service desk more efficient.

  • Track the percentage of failed changes.

  • Establish an effective problem management process.

• #3: Adopt new techniques

  • Use service-level indicators and objectives that allow the business to have confidence its service requirements are being met.

  • Consider the value of chaos engineering. It offers the ability to break the systems and understand what the break looks like, and more importantly, the steps you can take to ensure it does not happen in your production environment.