Industry research firm Gartner has never shied away from buzzwords, and at its annual Symposium conference in Orlando this morning it pushed the idea that CIOs and other senior IT executives are not only responsible for "digital transformation" but must now ready their organizations for what Gartner calls "ContinuousNext." That's the posture everyone should adopt in order to face and adapt to changes in technology, competition, and business.
Gartner executive vice president for research & advisory Mike Harris (above) began the opening keynote by talking about this shift. He emphasized that organizations must adjust to perpetual innovation, integration, and delivery. He noted that nearly 2 out of 3 CEOs and CFOs surveyed by the firm expect business model changes in the next few years, and picked out five major themes: culture, privacy, digital product management, augmented intelligence, and digital twins. Harris and other analysts addressed each in detail.
Harris suggested IT executives consider a new formula: (Mindsets + Practices) x Technology = Capabilities. As an example, Harris discussed the changes that have occurred in competitive cycling over the past decade, where shifts in culture, technology, and process have led to much faster results. In each of the cases, Harris and the other Gartner analysts urged attendees to consider "shift, shape, and share" as strategic principles.
Harris first talked about culture, and noted that change can lead to stress, which in turn leads to a reduction in revenue in many organizations. Gartner recently surveyed 13,000 organizations on Enterprise Technology Adoption (ETA), and found that the "strongest determinant of success is dynamism," or an organization's ability to embrace change. But, Harris said, three-quarters of all organizations surveyed reported struggling with dynamism.
Harris also discussed privacy, and said that if you don't properly manage privacy, your entire digital transformation is at risk. We've seen major changes in attitudes towards privacy, Harris said, with consumers ranking privacy beneath convenience, and said that balancing privacy against capabilities is difficult for most organizations. Organizations must put someone in charge of their privacy management program, detect and report breaches promptly, and give individuals control over their data.
Harris also discussed "augmented intelligence," and talked about how artificial intelligence systems have improved over the past few years. By 2021, Gartner expects expert systems will answer questions better than humans. But, he cautioned, AI isn't going to replace people—it will augment them.
The general view is that AI will change the workforce, and that is true, Harris said. Typically the view is also that these changes will be detrimental to workers. This isn't true, he argued, and cited a survey of organizations that have not used AI, which found that 77 percent of employees believe it will eliminate jobs. In companies that do use AI, 26 percent report job increases, compared with 16 percent who report job losses and 57 percent who said the use of AI resulted in no change. Harris talked about how companies like Infosys are redeploying 9,000 workers to higher-end jobs through training programs.
AI is easy to get wrong, on the other hand, and Harris said that in most cases it takes twice as long to get AI projects running as leaders expected. It's important to "choose your AI teachers well," he said. Followers will adopt AI technology, but leaders will build augmented intelligence, Harris concluded.
Gartner research vice president and distinguished analyst Kristin Moyer talked in detail about changing culture, and in particular discussed "culture hacking," suggesting that IT leaders embrace little changes, because it's the small changes that can amount to a big difference. For example, she suggested asking in each meeting whether the meeting advances the digital strategy, and cancelling the meeting it if it doesn't. Moyer noted that 46 percent of CIOs reported culture as one the biggest barriers to digital business. "Culture is a barrier," she said, "but here's the good news—people adapt."
Moyer said IT leaders need to transform culture from barrier to accelerator; by 2021, she said, CIOs will be just as responsible as chief human resource officers for culture changes. There are many little things that can be done in less than 48 hours that are easy, emotional, immediate, and visible, she said, such as determining that all decisions must be made in less than 48 hours, rewarding failure, and cancelling status meetings—to be replaced by short written updates.
Distinguished vice president and analyst Mark Raskino focused on digital product management, and said that product-centric delivery is the model at 78 percent of top performers, compared with only 35 percent of typical performers. He predicted that by 2020, three-quarters of digital business leaders will pivot from project to product portfolio management.
Your company needs to work more like a software company, Raskino said, and emphasized things like agile development, analytics, and continuous devops (combined development and operations), with weekly or daily updates. This supersedes traditional IT project management, he said, and is also a shift from delivering a project to owning a product, from the backstage to the front stage, and from focusing on completion to focusing on continuous innovation at scale for the customer.
Raskino cited examples at organization's such as Chase, McDonalds, and Transport for London, but focused on NCC, an asphalt and building material company that is building apps to track materials throughout their lifecycle. Overall, he said, this necessitates a change in mindsets and practices, and will require a new customer experience, culture, and talent.
Vice president Helen Huntley talked about digital twins, and noted how these began with the physical, for things like predictive maintenance, but are now being used in other areas, such as twins of athletes in video games using a digital game to improve in the real world.
Huntley pushed taking this a step further and creating Digital Twins of Organizations, using IoT data for physical items, but also modelling departments and business unit processes. The idea is to account for the physical and virtual world and back again, and model things like privacy breaches, natural disasters, and marketplace competition. Huntley said we're in early days here, but believes that in the future we will be able to model an entire business ecosystem in real time.
She gave a couple of examples, including Siemens, which is starting an order-to-cash process beginning in one city, mapping ongoing operations, and optimizing the process before rolling it out to more cities. Huntley also talked about a hospital that used a digital twin to improve efficiency and patient care based on real-time data.
Harris returned to conclude the keynote. There will always be a "next," he said, and challenged the audience to "make it real, make it yours, and make it now."