Frank Buytendijk, Distinguished VP, Gartner Fellow in Data and Analytics
‘Dealing with impact of social fractures is also the CIO’s job’ THE IMPACT OF IT HAS CHANGED DRAMATICALLY OVER THE PAST TEN YEARS, SAYS FRANK BUYTENDIJK, DISTINGUISHED VP, GARTNER FELLOW IN DATA AND ANALYTICS. ‘TEN YEARS AGO, IT'S JOB WAS PRIMARILY TO MAKE BUSINESS OPERATIONS MORE EFFICIENT. BUT SINCE THE EMERGENCE OF DIGITAL BUSINESS, IT HAS BEEN AT THE HEART OF THE BUSINESS AND THE BUSINESS MODEL, THE WAY YOU INTERACT WITH THE REST OF THE WORLD, BOTH ON THE TECHNICAL AND THE DATA SIDE.’ DURING THE IT SYMPOSIUM/XPOTM, GARTNER WILL TAKE CIOS THROUGH VARIOUS SCENARIOS ON HOW TO HANDLE THIS INTERACTION. By: Martijn regting
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he COVID-19 crisis has not brought us anything new, but what was already happening has been greatly accelerated, Buytendijk begins. Companies are primarily concerned with virtualizing the work environment. To the outside world, it’s about using AI applications to adapt the business model to what is happening in society, drawing on insights and predictions from data. ‘Over the past eighteen months, CIOs have been running around frantically trying to keep up with digital acceleration. In addition, the concept of the composable business helps to make processes, people, and the organization flexible and sustainable enough for whatever the future may bring. The idea is to divide everything into small blocks that you can put together in a variety of ways at any time to respond to upcoming events and changing needs.’ AGILE & MICROLEARNING Related to this, agile and microlearning has taken off enormously. No longer do we need to spend years on formal education or extensive courses, but – as is the case
with micro learning – we can frequently absorb fragments of information, knowledge, or explanations about specific tasks and developments. Buytendijk continues, ‘A new, agile way of learning is desperately needed because changes are ge ng faster. eople are already doing that a lot anyway. Often we don’t read a manual to perform a task anymore; we search for a YouTube video about it instead. And now it’s finding its way into the business world too.’ Fusion teams are a third internal change: pu ng people from various departments – IT, business, and the back o ce – together and giving them the mandate to work together to determine the best way to deploy IT. Here too, you can see where the composable business comes in: fusion teams that are structured but vary by subject being put together and deployed. This is a terrific learning path for the CIO, says Buytendijk. ‘You will learn how you and your employees will need to start learning differently and how to facilitate this for everyone; you will learn to work together differently to create a more agile way to run IT in the organization; you’ll
14 | Executive-People - 31 - Gartner Special
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learn how to virtualize the processes in the organization, all in accordance with the concept of the composable business.’ IMPACT ON SOCIETY A CIO shouldn’t just focus on the impact of IT on operations and the business, but also on society as a whole. ‘With the choices you make in IT and how you use data, you also influence the world outside your company. In terms of imaging, but also the actual impact – be it positive or negative.’ The increasing emphasis on IT and data usage does have a downside. More and more people are concerned about what is happening with their data. That’s the trouble with zero-knowledge computing: how can you make business decisions without using large amounts of data? That also requires another way to deal with data. Until now, the dominating trend has been to store data for no particular reason, allowing it to be used independently of the source system for each type of application. Now, we are seeing an increasing tendency toward storing data for a specific purpose. ‘ ust look at security,’ says Buytendijk. ‘That’s about how you as a company
Executive-People - 31 - Gartner Special
06-10-21 08:03
