Gartner Baby!

To everything (turn, turn, turn),

There is a season (turn, turn, turn)

The Byrds

Last week, in the sprawling conference centre next to the Barcelona Hilton, the great and the good of technology gathered for the annual Gartner IT Symposium Expo. For me it was my first. I was a little intimidated if I’m honest - a mix of not knowing how it all worked, where I was supposed to be at any given time and that perennial favourite - imposter syndrome. So I steeled my resolve with a cortado (I defy you to find a bad cup of coffee in Barcelona) and headed to the main auditorium for the keynote address - “Winning in the Turns: Leadership in a Digital Society”. 

The central theme of the keynote was that we - society - are facing turns. Disruptions in fogey speak for the likes of you and me. Geopolitical, environmental, economic and digital. But with those turn, those disruptions, come great opportunity. As competitors and peers fall by the wayside so our successful navigation of those turns will propel our organisation forward.  So how do we win in the turns? How do we, as IT leaders, make sure we take these disruptions as well as we can and keep moving forward? By now I was feeling like Lewis Hamilton! Gartner’s answer? TechQuilibrium. 

Now that is a Gartnerism if ever there was one. The natural cynic in me silently guffawed at such management consultant speak but I listened on. Was there any method in their madness? TechQuilibrium is the point of balance between being a traditional company and being a digital company (Val Sribar, Gartner SVP, Research & Advisory). The tech giants are becoming more invested traditional industries (Google and cars, Amazon and supermarkets, Netflix making as opposed to just distributing content) and traditional industries are becoming more invested in digital (CitiBank hoovering up AI start ups, McDonalds tie in with Uber Eats). They are searching for their TechQuilibrium. At what point will they reach it? Well, that depends on the right balance of digital and traditional goods and services for them. Interesting point, I thought to myself.

To make things more complex, this balance, this TechQuilibrium, is always shifting. This shape shifting is driven in part by innovation and what can be done digitally but also by customers becoming more accepting of digital services as opposed to traditional ones. Similarly, as both regulation and legislation modernise, the right mix of digital and traditional - the point of TechQuilibrium - changes. OK, I was getting into this, it was making sense. 

Most industries, most companies are always going to put their customers front and centre (my organisation Optivo is no different) and so they should. However, we don't want the internal digitisation of processes (e.g. HR, finance, procurement) to lag too far behind external digitisation. Otherwise our staff are always going struggle to meet customer expectation. Who was I kidding? They had me at 'internal digitisation'!

Then came something I wasn't expecting, something that really grabbed my attention. The biggest 'turn' we're facing is information security and to 'win' we need to act like it isn't just a moral imperative but rather a basic human right. That chimed. Given the damage you can do to someone with untrammeled access to their personal data, it actually makes sense. Positioning it like that really landed with me and certainly makes it easier to convince the business that money isn’t the only answer - it is about policy, culture and education as well. 

So there are some turns ahead no doubt. And I am convert to TechQuilibrium. As always with Gartner, they have the knack of articulating macro concepts in consumable ways. I sloped off to the coffee bar, ordered another cortado and began plotting how Optivo might 'win in the turns'.