Gartner's Glimpse of 2010 IT Issues

Gartner's IT Expo &a,p; Symposium is being held this week in Orlando. During the opening keynote address, Gartner's leading analysts made some predictions and recommendations for IT. Gartner's findings may foretell what business issues and budget restraints VARs could be facing in 2010.

Flexible Budgets a Must.

Buzz on the street indicates economic recovery and growth may be on its way, but, it is no big surprise that Gartner predicts few CIOs will enjoy a budget increase. To address the IT challenges associated with anticipated growth with limited resources, Gartner recommends IT departments lobby for what they call a rolling forecast flexible budget that will support businesses return to growth through flexibility and reactionary resource allocation.

Reexamine Application Investments

Gartner suggests that IT must prepare in earnest for a return to growth without a commensurate increase in budgets. IT must take a closer look at application portfolios and reduce unnecessary, unproductive and costly deployments in order to free up cash and resources for essential spend.

Revise Business Cases

Gartner recommends IT organizations take a close look at business cases templates for new investments to reflect the total lifetime cost of ownership and not just the cost of the project. Gartner research indicates that the cost for an application to go live is, on average, 8 percent of the total lifetime cost of ownership based on fifteen years of ownership.

Social Media & The Collective

The spread of social media makes information fly faster and further than ever before. Gartner has defined and labeled the collective as empowered, essential and able to galvanize quickly. From individuals to groups to markets and communities, the collective is everyone and everything that shapes the direction of society and business.

Embrace the Viral:

Banning social networking is futile. Instead, Gartner recommends companies harness the passion of employees and revise codes of conduct to reflect changing times. Gartner suggest that social software in the workplace can be used to identify untapped employee expertise and examine social networks at work within organizations.

Data Integrity Builds Trust

IT needs to build trust through the acquisition and dissemination of reliable and accurate information. Governance, information architectures, improved data quality and integration is needed to achieve an enterprise-wide view of critical business data. Gartner suggests that the implementation and adoption of enterprise metrics frameworks is the key to building trust.

Metrics and Modeling

According to Gartner, businesses need to optimize the use of performance management applications for planning and simulation instead of analyzing already-known outcomes. Then, organizations will be able to identify negative probabilities and soaring successes simultaneously for greater operational excellence.

A New Kind of Risk Management

Gartner suggests organizations learn how to balance risk and performance by enabling the necessary and productive flow of information. Traditional security approaches that solely focus on keeping the bad guys out are outdated. Focus should be on mitigating risk and embracing transparency.

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