The Gartner Symposium Blogs, Day 04 – A fitting finale.

The last day of this majestic event saw a lot of exhausted faces, struggling to keep up with the bombardment of information that has been thrown at us left, right and centre. What’s more, this is not just from the Gartner analysts, but also from benchmarking with peers. The closing scenes saw people rushing to absorb the maximum, before speeding away to catch early afternoon flights, etc.!

The sessions began with a keynote by Jamie Anderson (Professor of Strategic Management, Antwerp Management School), which had people going gaga over what Jamie appropriately called ‘Gaganomics’. It was about how Lady Gaga disrupted the music industry with her vision of creating a music revolution. The stress was on 3Es, leading to a 4th E. Creating Excitement, Tapping Emotions and Building Exclusivity,  to Engage well with our customers. He stressed that with a wide variety of tools available for social media mining and sentiment analyses, this is something no brand can live without.
Apps über alles! (Apps rule everything) That cloud, mobility & the API revolution is what would be driving the future IT economy, was the crux of Chris’ discourse today. Once again, he delivered a perfectly apt session about the world moving into an API economy. It might not be B2B or B2C, it could even be a B2D – Business to Demand! How do we balance the supply of Open Apps, Enterprise Apps, etc. with the demand for it on various tablets, phones, OS’, etc. Through Citizen Development, or Shadow IT, or maybe even through croudsourcing, and this might drive the open API revolution, where investments Vs transactions is still the current question mark. The API billionaire club showcased was pretty interesting – Twitter at 13 billion API calls per day (Note: Every tweet is an API call!), Facebook at 5 billion, GDS’ like Sabre at 1 biliion are very much the reality. Different business models already exist to create and elicit the maximum benefits from Apps, including Pay Per Use, Freemium, revenue sharing, etc. Some common features include openness for mobility, information exchange, transactions, customers, employees, and more, to create an ecosystem.  So, remember – Embrace the API Fever. Join the API revolution!

Bhavish Sood spoke on Mobile Business Intelligence and how it can impart on-location decision making capabilities. The different areas he covered included Business Intelligence (BI) Content Mobilization, Management Dashboards, Fieldworker Reporting, Mobile Analytics and Mobile BI Applications. Delivery of a user-friendly and visually compelling user experience will foster adoption by new constituencies and increase BI usage. Key characteristics as expected would include responsiveness to different devices, rich information visualization, information overlay on maps, touch screen experience, etc. The ability to use sensors like the camera, microphone, and GPS would further assist in creating the context for BI applications. While a BYOD policy is being increasingly adopted in many organizations, creating a mobile ecosystem remains the most critical part.

The sessions ended on a high, with a keynote by Partha and Chris that summarized what we can look forward to in the future. Some of the interesting thoughts to chew on include: how digitalization will increasingly impact the changing roles across the board from CIO, CMO, Sales, etc; how digitalization will affect various industries, from IT to manufacturing; and more. It left us all with a lot of food for thought to ponder over! As Partha put it, the ever pervasive Digitalization wave will change everything and everyone, hopefully for the better!

Let’s make sure we’re not left behind!
Just in case you missed out on the other days. Read them here:
GartnerSym Day 3
GartnerSym Day 2
GartnerSym Day 1