The theme for the symposium 'Leading in a Digital World' encourages organisations to 'digitise' in the information era. Cape Town can be proud to host the first 2013 event on a global scale as the analysts will be travelling to Orlando, Florida in the states and ending their tour in Dubai in 2014.
Organisations need to recognise that paper is the past and digitising is the future if they want to be part of an information society. 'In the new information-rich organisation the worker is no longer a cog in a machine but an intelligent part of the overall process,' according to Bill Gates vision.
A successful organisation makes quicker decisions by going digital and defining their unique corporate IQ, which measures how easily an employee or manager can share information, creating intellectual capital.
The Gartner research analysts have broken down this vision to a fine art with information widely available for all attendees about how to digitise an organisation.
The opening address on Monday with Peter Sondergaard (@PeterSonderg), Gartner's Senior VP of Research, welcomed the 12,000 attendees.
The main focus of the 2013 symposium is fusing the consumers' world with automation of all products that should be integrated with devices that communicate, says Peter, and changing from a fixed environment to a more mobile environment.
The first session introduced the seated guests to the Gartner analyst keynotes provided by Peter Sondergaard, Tom Scholtz, John Mahoney and Alexa Bona. A previous conversation topic by Chris Howard, Research Vice President, (@chrishoward88), introduced the Nexus of Forces in 2011, consists of four key components for an organisation to become digitised: Social, Mobile, Cloud and Information.
The presentation asks the organisation to become more business-centric and less tech-centric.
The second day gave the attendees multiple tracks to choose. The first track focused on 'Leading and managing growth and business advantage,' which explains how IT leaders should be connecting with enterprise stakeholders and exploiting information communication and technology.
The second track focused on 'Strategic investment for a dynamic future,' where attendees could gain some of Gartner's insights to the convergence of social, mobile, cloud and information model.
The third track focused on 'Building and operating an adaptive digital infrastructure,' which explains user access and unified communications to support multiple devices such as tablets and smartphones.
The fourth track focused on 'Transforming business through intelligent use of information and applications,' where big data and information-centric cultures should be cultivating modernisation for the digital organisation spanning into 2020.
The third day ended off with Chris Howard discussing the top trends for an organisation to recognise in their strategic planning for 2014-2016.
The main buzzwords announced at the end of the day include 'The Era of Personal Cloud', 'Internet of Everything', Cloud/Client App Architecture', 'Mobile Apps & Ecosystems', Hybrid clouds,' '3-D printing' and 'Smart Machines' to name a few.
The tweeters had #GartnerSym trending on the Monday morning. Their twitter account for the symposium is @Gartner_inc which is their global account.
For all the highlights tweeted during the presentations, follow @CoereneVosloo
