Gartner IT IOCS Conference Highlights: Creating More Effective IT I&O Leaders
This slideshow showcases key sessions at Gartner's 2023 IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference that will help I&O leaders become more effective.
December 14, 2023
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Instead of reacting to changes, I&O leaders need to take charge and accept that there is no fixed endpoint or goal. That means you and your staff need a generative mindset. Gartner analysts Tom Bittman, Dennis Smith, and Autumn Stanish used the keynote stage at the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference to illustrate the need for generative transformation in infrastructure and operations (I&O).
"[I&O leaders must] embrace the process of transformation as a way of operating," Bittman said. "And we have a name for this. We call this generative transformation."
He added, "We've got to build the capability to thrive through accelerating change, and we believe the only way forward is generative transformation."
Gartner breaks generative transformation into three parts:
GenAI: Embracing generative AI to empower your people and transform your processes.
Infrastructure platform engineering: Using infrastructure platform engineering to optimize infrastructure delivery.
Empowering people: Equipping your staff with the capabilities and the mindset needed to support your generative transformation.
"The health, growth, and future of your organization, it requires a new approach. It requires a generative transformation that will equip you and your teams with the capabilities you need to handle all the inflection points yet to come." — Smith
There was more than one session on generative AI, and rightly so, as it has taken the tech industry (and the world) by storm this past year. Gartner Distinguished VP Analyst Arun Chandrasekaran led two of those sessions to discuss the hype cycle of generative AI and the future implications of GenAI on I&O.
Chandrasekaran began his first session by asking whether generative AI is a game-changer or overhyped. The potential for GenAI is going to be transformational, he said, but in the short run there are a lot of speed bumps to overcome.
When will generative AI mature? "Despite our best efforts, I still think that this ecosystem is going to evolve in completely unexpected ways," he said. "Which is why I have the roller coaster ride picture there [see chart above], which is, prepare for the roller coaster because this is a space that's going to evolve very, very rapidly."
Chandrasekaran outlined best practices for effective usage of GenAI in I&O. "The potential use cases for GenAI is quite substantial," he said, adding that very few enterprises are running these use cases at scale. Potential use cases include: prediction/forecasting, anomaly detection, segmentation/classification, recommendation systems, code generation, optimization and planning, decision intelligence, knowledge discovery, conversational UIs, autonomous systems, intelligent automation, and perception.
While there are risks, there are actions to take to mitigate those risks, Chandrasekaran said:
Loss of intellectual property: Use enterprise model APIs; prompt governance is key; review third-party service agreements.
Hallucinations: Ground the models via RAG or fine-tuning, tools, and humans to vet output.
Security: Implement strong data protection and guardrails for data protection and adversarial attacks.
Explainability: Deploy solutions for explainability; prioritize data referability.
Fairness: Use content moderation and bias detection tools; educate business and IT leaders.
Misue: Enforce strict access control and approval process; deploy observability tools.
Workforce impact: Embark skills training, map career paths, and provide emotional assistance. "AI will not replace human beings. But AI will replace a human being that refuses to use AI," he said.
"In a nutshell, we believe in the long-term potential of [generative AI], but we've got to overcome obstacles in the short term." — Chandrasekaran
One emphasis of this year's Gartner conference is that we can't just live in the present. We must always be looking ahead. And that includes with cloud computing. Gartner Distinguished VP Analyst Dennis Smith led a session called "The Future of Cloud in 2028: From Technology to Business Necessity," where he explained why the cloud in 2028 will be a business necessity.
Here are seven predictions Smith made about the cloud that he said companies need to anticipate heading toward 2028:
Multicloud: By 2028, more than 50% of enterprises won't get value from their multicloud implementations.
Cloud-native platforms: By 2028, cloud-native platforms will serve as the foundation for more than 95% of digital initiatives, up from less than 50% today.
Modernization: By 2028, modernization efforts will culminate in 70% of workloads running in a cloud environment, up from 25% today.
Industry solutions: By 2028, more than 50% of enterprises will use industry cloud platforms to accelerate their business initiatives.
Digital sovereignty: By 2028, over 50% of multinational enterprises will have digital sovereignty strategies, up from less than 10% today.
Sustainability: By 2028, the percentage of global enterprises prioritizing sustainability will rise to over 50%, up from less than 25% today.
AI/ML: By 2028, the adoption of AI will culminate in over 50% of cloud compute resources devoted to AI workloads, up from less than 10% today.
"In 2028, if you don't have a cloud strategy and aren't successfully executing on it, then frankly you are pretty much putting your business at risk." — Smith
Even with the best intentions, there can be gaps in sustainability efforts. So how do you take I&O sustainability to the next level to fill those gaps? That was the topic of Gartner Senior Principal Analyst Autumn Stanish's session: "The I&O Leader's Guide to Sustainable Technology." And her answer was sustainable technology.
While there are two ways to look at sustainable technology — sustainability of IT itself and sustainability with IT (using technologies to make the rest of the enterprise and its customers more sustainable) — Stanish focused her talk on the environmental portion, specifically the sustainability of IT. She encouraged I&O leaders to engage with existing suppliers to identify sustainable technology solutions that they can use now. But go beyond these quick wins and develop a strategic plan for improving I&O sustainability performance, she urged.
"[Sustainable technology is] a framework of technology solutions designed to help us achieve: 1) environmental sustainability goals, 2) social impact and improve our diversity and things like that. And then the governance, which helps us scale all of this." — Stanish
I&O leaders are facing some tremendous challenges, and it's the effective ones who are able to navigate these issues. But how do you become an effective I&O leader? In a session titled "Key Behaviors That Drive I&O Leader Effectiveness," Gartner Senior Director Analyst Chris Saunderson and Senior Principal Paul Wang shared tips on becoming more effective.
The image above contains 13 honeycombs that are the effectiveness drivers of heads of I&O. Saunderson and Wang called this the roadmap for being more effective. Each of these actions will help you become a more effective leader, they claimed.
Of the 13, the analysts called out these four as the most important: 1) making time for strategic planning, 2) adopting a platform orientation, 3) clarifying I&O's career and advancement paths, and 4) aligning to business with customer-focused metrics.
Saunderson and Wang left the audience with these four recommendations:
1. Identify your effectiveness gaps and build an effectiveness action roadmap.
2. Focus on the future of your role by balancing your need to fight immediate fires against proactive strategic planning.
3. Prioritize designing and directing initiatives that allow your workforce and delivery models to adapt and support evolving business needs.
4. Benchmarks are useful data points, but your unique risk appetite, value management, and cost optimization requirements should anchor your decisions.
"As a leader, every decision you make is like a drop of water. It creates ripples that impact your business. … And you can't rely on knowledge alone to make your decisions. It takes wisdom too. What do I mean by that? Well, wisdom is more than knowledge. It's not just learned. It's also experienced. But the pressures of being an I&O leader means that don't have that much room to fail to gain that wisdom." — Wang
Is it possible to boost IT productivity without piling on more work? Many leaders believe we can't have both productivity and wellbeing. However, a Gartner study has found that longer hours for the most part don't lead to more productivity, Gartner Distinguished VP Analyst Graham Waller said in his session titled "Powering Productivity: 5 Ways to Boost IT Employee Output and Wellbeing."
To prove his point, Waller shared this quote from the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health: "Being awake for 24 hours is similar to having a blood alcohol concentration of 0.10%." If a blood alcohol level of 0.08% is considered legally drunk, how impaired must your employees be if they have been awake for 24 hours?
How can IT employees be both productive and not be overworked? The answer, according to Waller, is human-centric work design. "Human-centric [is] where we base the work design around the people in the work, not around an office, not around the historic norm, 9 to 5 in an office five days a week," he said.
It has three components: flexible experiences (but not a free-for-all), intentional collaboration (rethinking how we collaborate in a hybrid work world), and empathy-based management (putting employees in position to do their best work).
The are five ways to boost employee output and wellbeing (as shown in the chart above):
Adopt a data-driven path to productivity
Co-create flexible work experiences
Protect focus time, provide purposeful sync time
Manage by outcomes and support employees
Deliver human-centric digital enablement
If it looks like a lot to handle, that's because it is. Waller made it a point to tell session attendees that they don't have to do all of this. Instead, ask yourself, "If I were going to take one action, where's the biggest lever I can take to improve productivity and wellbeing?" Small steps are better than no steps after all.
"We all have an opportunity to leave the workplace better than we found it, to help our teams be more productive and not burnt out all the time, doing their best work being at their most creative." — Waller
Gartner VP Analyst Paul Furtado began his session on ransomware ("Ransomware Is Changing — Are You Ready?") by admitting that it's a scary subject because of the impact it is having on organizations — and the fact that it is changing.
It's not a matter of if, but when you will be attacked Furtado said, who shared this quote from John Zangardi, former chief information officer for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, to help make his point: "You're going to be the victim of a ransomware attack! That's not admitting defeat, it is preparing for success." But how do you prepare?
Furtado touched on four topics:
To pay or not to pay
How much of a threat is ransomware?
How ransomware works
What can you do about ransomware
Furtado called the first topic the elephant in the room — should you or should you not pay? His short answer? It's a business decision but payment should be the last resort (he claims that if you pay, you will be targeted again).
We're seeing an attack about every 11 seconds, he said, and that will drop down to every 2 seconds in the next few years. Who are the bad actors behind these attacks? Insiders, hackers, hacktivists, and nation-states who are very well organized, Furtado said.
The really scary part, he said, is that it's cheap: "The best-selling malware on the dark web right now is selling for about $14." Even scarier is that with ChatGPT it can also be free. And those were just two of a number of "scary parts" Furtado warned session attendees about.
He did end his talk with some hope — and best practices:
Prepare: Have a ransomware playbook.
Focus on your ability to detect and contain: 24/7 monitoring is a must.
Focus on your recovery: Have immutable backups, data protection, and tested recovery in place.
"The only thing harder than defending yourself against ransomware is explaining toy our board, CEO, customers why you didn't protect yourself from an attack." — Furtado
Gartner Senior Director Analyst Tori Paulman opened Day 2 of Gartner's 2023 I&O and cloud conference with a call to allyship.
"Every single one of us in this room needs something in this very moment. Let me just ask you, When was the last time someone asked you what you needed? And if they did, would you even be willing to share it?" Paulman asked those attending her keynote, titled "What Good Looks Like — Stories of Allyship."
Here is where IT leaders can make a difference. They have an opportunity to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) by acting as an ally to people in marginalized and underrepresented groups.
"We have unknowingly created a work environment where everyone comes to work every day and lies and fakes — and hides," Paulman said. "How long can your organization possibly thrive under those circumstances? But there is a solve. You can shift us from us versus us to us by unleashing the dynamic leader inside you."
The dynamic leader is an ally to coworkers, having empathy and willing to take action. "Allyship means taking the advantages that we have, and we all have advantages in our life, … and using them to speak up and stand beside those who are marginalized or not in the room," Paulman said.
Paulman used the rest of the keynote using stories of peers on their own journeys to help attendees become an allyship champion.
"Ultimately, the hallmark of a champion ally is not that they get it right all of the time. It's also not that they undergo some sort of personality transplant while they're here in this room," Paulman said.
Champion allies have three traits:
They are committed to make deliberate choices that show this as an important value in their life and in their leadership in a way that other people can see.
They are intentional — taking intentional action to include those who are not in the room.
They follow through to see that unintentional harm is repaired and acknowledged.
"Take intentional action to include those who are not in the room. Ask yourself who's not in this room right now. Place a chair in every room you make a decision; identify who's not in that room." — Paulman
There are three things, according to Gartner VP Analyst Jeffrey Hewitt, that infrastructure and operations people do: They optimize what they implement. They secure it. And they innovate. And there are two factors that help them innovate: "One, to think differently. And then two, to get a little bit out ahead of things. Not too far. But a little bit out ahead of things. So when we innovate, we get some real results out of it," Hewitt told attendees of his session titled "Top Trends Impacting Infrastructure and Operations."
To help I&O leaders get ahead of things, Hewitt shared six trends that are expected to significantly impact I&O in 2024 and beyond.
Machine customers: "A machine customer, well, they're acting on behalf of a human customer, but they act of their own enablement."
AI trust, risk, and security management (AI TRiSM): "This approach can help protect against AI problems — privacy, security, bias, any of those things. ... It also will improve the AI efficiencies."
Augmented-connected workforce: "It's really providing some augmentation to workers, especially if there's any complex issues they deal with, in order to help them more effectively do their job."
Continuous threat exposure management (CTEM): "You want to be able to look proactively at what's going on and … [scan] the horizon here for all the vulnerabilities, not just the typical ones."
Democratized generative AI (GenAI): "When it comes to I&O, there are two aspects of this. One is the implementation. We're going to be responsible for implementing. … We're also going to be able to use it. It has a lot of potential for us to run all kinds of test scenarios, look for security vulnerabilities."
Nationalism versus globalism: "With all the conflicts in the world, there are a lot of initiatives to keep things within given geographies. Whether it's cloud capabilities, whether it's skills, whether it's data, we're seeing a significant emphasis placed by a lot of countries and geographies on this."
(For more on these trends, click here.)
"These are the six trends … machine customers; AI trust, risk and security management; the augmented connected workforce; continuous threat exposure management; democratized generative AI; and nationalism versus globalism. What can you do? Well, take a look. Any of those trends that you say are going to impact your organization that you feel you need to respond to, prioritize those. Say, 'Let's take a look at those. Yeah, this is going to hit us, this could have also potential great benefit. Let's prioritize it. And then we'll take a look at what skills we need.'" — Hewitt
There are few coaches who have been as successful as Mike Krzyzewski. His accomplishments are too many to list here, but here are a few: As head men's basketball coach at Duke University, the Blue Devils won five NCAA championships and he was voted national coach of the year seven times. In 2001, Coach K was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. And in 2008, he proved he was more than just a college coach — that he could also coach the best players in the world — by leading the men's U.S. Olympic basketball team (the "Redeem Team") to a gold medal.
With such an impressive résumé of winning, it was no wonder that his guest keynote speech ("Victory Through Teamwork and Leadership") the first night of the Gartner event was packed, even after a long day of attending sessions and making connections — and with dinner and the casinos calling attendees. And Coach K didn't disappoint, using humor and humility to paint a picture of a true leader.
Coach K packed a lot into his keynote, including four steps to being an effective leader, especially in the face of adversity:
Positive self-talk: "I say to myself, 'I believe in me. I believe in you.' … So belief in you and your team."
Everyone is equal in at least one thing. "We all are responsible for our attitude. Nobody makes you have an attitude. … So at that time I say I have a great attitude."
Prepare: "Full disclosure right away. Let's figure out how this happened. We're not blaming anybody. Yeah, that happened. Let's go. We can't stay here. And so we prepare; we find out what happened and prepare."
Execution: "The fourth step is beautiful, it's execution. And so we go from something bad to where a lot of times with the execution we find something that we might never had found out about our team."
Organizations that stand the test of time have value-based leaders and are value-based organizations, according to Coach K, who shared seven values applied at Duke:
Integrity
Respect
Courage
Selfless service
Loyalty
Duty
Trust
"You don't just put your values on a shirt or put it on a piece of paper and say, 'Look at all the values we have.' You have to teach and live your values. And your values then become part of your — one of the great words — culture." — Coach K
There are few coaches who have been as successful as Mike Krzyzewski. His accomplishments are too many to list here, but here are a few: As head men's basketball coach at Duke University, the Blue Devils won five NCAA championships and he was voted national coach of the year seven times. In 2001, Coach K was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. And in 2008, he proved he was more than just a college coach — that he could also coach the best players in the world — by leading the men's U.S. Olympic basketball team (the "Redeem Team") to a gold medal.
With such an impressive résumé of winning, it was no wonder that his guest keynote speech ("Victory Through Teamwork and Leadership") the first night of the Gartner event was packed, even after a long day of attending sessions and making connections — and with dinner and the casinos calling attendees. And Coach K didn't disappoint, using humor and humility to paint a picture of a true leader.
Coach K packed a lot into his keynote, including four steps to being an effective leader, especially in the face of adversity:
Positive self-talk: "I say to myself, 'I believe in me. I believe in you.' … So belief in you and your team."
Everyone is equal in at least one thing. "We all are responsible for our attitude. Nobody makes you have an attitude. … So at that time I say I have a great attitude."
Prepare: "Full disclosure right away. Let's figure out how this happened. We're not blaming anybody. Yeah, that happened. Let's go. We can't stay here. And so we prepare; we find out what happened and prepare."
Execution: "The fourth step is beautiful, it's execution. And so we go from something bad to where a lot of times with the execution we find something that we might never had found out about our team."
Organizations that stand the test of time have value-based leaders and are value-based organizations, according to Coach K, who shared seven values applied at Duke:
Integrity
Respect
Courage
Selfless service
Loyalty
Duty
Trust
"You don't just put your values on a shirt or put it on a piece of paper and say, 'Look at all the values we have.' You have to teach and live your values. And your values then become part of your — one of the great words — culture." — Coach K
This year's Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference was chock-full of sessions to help I&O leaders and team members overcome challenges and pursue opportunities.
Throughout the three-day event, which took place at the Venetian in Las Vegas last week, one word was mentioned over and over (and over and over and over — well, you get the point). That word, of course, was "generative."
And it wasn't just as part of generative AI, although I’m not sure there were any sessions that didn't mention GenAI at least once. In fact, in session on the metaverse ("Building a Digital Future: The Metaverse"), Gartner VP Marty Resnick did his best not to use the term, even asking attendees for an over/under on the number of times he would let it slip into his talk. "I'm kind of curious," he said. "The over/under — we're in Vegas, we need to bet a little bit. I am going to try not to use the words 'generative AI' for the next 30 minutes." The audience set an over/under of 5 and the final tally was just 2, a feat that earned him an ovation. (Resnick did say, by the way, that despite no longer being the shiny new toy thanks to GenAI, "the metaverse is not dead.")
The opening keynote, however, was filled with the word "generative" — but it was used mainly with "transformation" not "AI." The keynote speakers spoke of the need for generative transformation, which to attain, workforces would need a "generative mindset."
Speaking of shiny new things, it wasn't all learning and networking for Gartner attendees — from the conference windows (and from much of the Las Vegas Strip) you couldn't miss the Sphere, a new music and entertainment arena that opened in September. Many of the attendees were lucky enough to see U2 perform inside the Sphere, which boasts a 16K resolution wraparound interior LED screen.
Sphere2
If you weren't able to attend this year's Gartner IT IOCS conference and so missed out on the 178 research-driven sessions and 125 exhibitors, this slideshow will give you a taste of what Gartner believes I&O leaders should focus on in the coming year — and best practices for getting the job done.
The sessions highlighted in this slideshow offer insights into empowering your staff while developing their skills and increasing their productivity, as well as delve into such topics as generative AI, cloud computing, ransomware, hiring, diversity, sustainable tech, and more.
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