Opening Keynote at Gartner Symposium

The focus of the opening keynote was themed along the key aspects of Cloud, Social, Information and Mobile computing.

These four key areas together form a nexus of forces which makes any and all recent architectures immediately obsolete. The information technology paradigm is easily overshadowed by Information Ecology.
However, all of this comes at a great risk. In fact, most disruptive technologies come with significant risks that needs to be appropriately harnessed into a risk adjusted value management. It belies the oft-held belief that risk management in the face of constant disruption is a waste of time.

The keynote was structured around 3 themes:
Post-Modern Business
Simplicity
Creative Destruction

Peter Sonnengard clearly outlined that companies that use leading risk indicators clearly outperform their competitors. The reality, of course, is that in today's dire economic climate, it is easier said than done. The forecast for overall IT spend is predicted to be just under 4% through 2015. This outlook is made by Gartner after factoring the continued sluggish growth of the economy.

Daryl Plummer went on to talk about post-modern Business. So what really is post-modern business? It is an "anything goes" approach that focuses on deeper relationship with customers, suppliers and partners. It is a business "with no walls" mantra where you rely on delighting customers, garnering the interest of disengaged customers and combating their short attention span.

Hung Lehong talked about simplicity as a paradigm in today's way of doing business. By 2015, four mobile apps will be deployed for every single traditional PC based application. This necessitates a basic "rethink" in developing systems that are context aware and people centric resulting in a rich user experience.

Tina Nunno closed out the keynote by speaking about creative destruction. For those of us not in the know, it is a controlled rationalization of existing IT and Business assets in the hopes of a leaner and meaner organizational system. Therefore, every IT and business executive should evaluate their own appetite for risk. This will facilitate that technology does not create limits but actually facilitates the lowering of barriers.

All good points which made for an effective keynote.