Unable to attend this meeting, I was fortunate enough to have one of our clients pass his notes on from a recent Gartner summit regarding IT end user sentiments. The information was collected by Gartner and reflects the forward thinking of many IT buyers and decision makers for the upcoming 2010 year. Although most of these thoughts are a bit random, I always appreciate the chance to peek inside the mindsets of the tech buyers. I think the pattern here suggests that there is opportunity for tech marketers to identify how their solutions fit within the context of the current conversations.
For tech marketers to take advantage of these opportunities, you must build the content and prove out your solutions as they relate to what is on the it buyers mind.
IT end user sentiments in 2010:
* 6.9m jobs lost since 2008 in the US, and unemployment is still rising.
* The IT industry is exiting its worst year ever.
* Healthcare, Utilities and Government will be the first sectors to recover.
* While the IT industry is on its way to recovery, we expect that by 2012 we will only be at 2008 revenue levels.
* 60% of CEOs surveyed think IT is holding the business back.
* In 2009 1m servers will have their replacement delayed, which means increased risk to the enterprise.
* The age of the IT industry’s hardware is increasing because many companies are delaying the purchases of servers, PCs, etc. So we need to plan for increased equipment failure rates.
* The top 3 focus areas right now are cost management, growth and risk management.
* Pattern Based Strategies—this is a hot theme, and the most profound of all. It’s about implementing a framework that seeks models and looks for leading indicators in the marketplace and then exploits them (e.g. CPM, business analytics).
* What’s the new normal? Regulatory oversight will increase dramatically because of all the bailouts.
* There will be a demand for increased accountability and transparency all the time now.
* Increased scrutiny of IT is a good thing—it gives you more data to work with and forces you to see where IT is contributing.
* Bloated apps portfolio is the big pink elephant in the apps space. Apps are growing at 4-7%/year.
* Apps portfolio management needs to reduce costs and risks.
* IT starts with an inventory of apps (you do have one, right??!).
* Start by assigning a business owner, use data (eg. Cost, utilization and risk) to justify its existence.
* The “Collective” is a major force out there. Don’t ignore it or try to control it. It’s pervasive and galvanizes around the social network and is very influential (e.g. YouTube and Facebook). You can’t halt it.
* Whether the company allows it or not, people are doing social networking.
* Don’t miss the early signals about what’s coming (e.g. Wall Street).
* Don’t view your strategy as linear—that blinds us to emerging patterns, and that takes a behavioral problem and makes it worse with a systems problem.
* Finance’s biggest challenge is how to forecast results.
* Don’t ignore The Collective—it’s something we can’t ignore and it helps with early pattern detection
* We need a performance measuring system that plans, simulates and forecasts performance at all levels of the organization.
* Security. Don’t try to protect yourself as much as possible. Ask yourself what you will do to protect yourselves and what you won’t do. You can’t protect against everything.
* Risk management’s philosophy is to protect against reasonable threats. Accept risk to perform well.
* You must have Transparency for the Return to Growth in the new business environment.
* Like IT, security must measure its impact on the business.
* If all you focus on is cost, then everything you look at will be an expense.
* Balance cost, risk and growth to be successful.
