Preview: Gartner Symposium-ITxpo 2009

Event features 54 sessions aimed at CIOs

The Gartner Symposium-ITxpo, which runs from 2-5 November in Cannes, will feature 54 sessions around leadership, strategy and budgeting aimed directly at UK and European chief information officers (CIOs).

Jeffrey Mann, research vice president for collaboration and social software at research giant Gartner Research, will focus on social software, team work spaces, the collaboration market and knowledge management. Mann tells Computing why CIOs will benefit from advice from Gartner analysts.

Who does Gartner expect to attend the Symposium?

We have noticed a trend towards attendance from more senior level IT executives in the past couple of years. About a third will be CIOs, and we are seeing more aspirational project managers, or wannabe CIOs, but fewer IT practitioners or content makers.

What are the main themes of the event?

Overall it will be about how to prepare for the economic recovery. In the middle of the current crisis when the banks were falling, it was all doom and gloom and everyone was preparing for the worst. But now customers are telling us they have made their cuts and are looking further ahead. That’s not to say that times are good now and that organisations can go ahead and start spending freely, more that they need to be able to retain discipline and leave out the fat they have already cut.

What's the benefit for the CIOs attending?

Meeting their peers is one part of it, but that isn't enough to justify their time and money, so what we want to do is help them prepare for 2010. We really want them to hold up their strategic and tactical planning cycles for review against the things that Gartner thinks will be happening in the IT industry next year and beyond. The hope is that this review will become part of their transactional planning process, it will help them make sure they are on the right track, remind them of things they may have overlooked, and prevent them having to go back and start again.

Are IT budgets likely to grow again any time soon?

If you demonstrate you can live on a lean diet, it is hard to get the CEO to say ‘Sure, go ahead and start spending’. But whereas six months ago there was no room for new initiatives, now there is some saved money that can be invested in other areas to make additional savings and to improve products and services.

Frozen or shrinking budgets are something that CIOs have had to deal with for a long time, the difference is that the process has now accelerated. It used to be that they could just tend the store and keep the email running, but that has gone out of the window. Now it's about exposing and constantly justifying the amount of spending that goes into the organisation's IT infrastructure.

How big a part does cloud computing have to play in reducing expenditure on IT infrastructure?

The benefits from concepts like cloud computing which get a lot of attention are not necessarily the concepts themselves, but the influence they have on other areas in terms of shaping thinking, altering programming models or tweaking operational management processes, for example.

The hype around the public cloud has started discussions around good computing practice, taking big servers, adding components and duplicating those services on private clouds without making any changes [to the applications]. Another benefit is a greater diversification of ideas about cloud computing. Initially it was Amazon web services, Google apps and so on, but we are now moving towards CRM being cloud based, and big vendors like IBM and Sun are looking at ways to port enterprise applications onto the cloud.