Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2021 India: Day 1 Highlights

November 30, 2021

Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo 2021 India: Day 1 Highlights

We are bringing you news and highlights from Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo, taking place this week virtually in India. Below is a collection of the key announcements and insights coming out of the conference.

On Day 1 from the conference, we are highlighting the Opening Keynote, the Gartner Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2022, and results of the 2021 Gartner Digital Worker Survey. Be sure to check this page throughout the day for updates.

Key Announcements

• Gartner Survey Reveals 50% of Indian Hybrid Workers Consider Themselves More Productive When Working Remotely
• Gartner Forecasts IT Spending in India to Reach $100 Billion in 2022

Gartner Opening Keynote: Where Next: Technology Leadership in a World Disrupted

Presented by Mbula Schoen, Sr Director Analyst, Gartner; Hung LeHong, Distinguished VP Analyst & Gartner Fellow; and Daryl Plummer, Distinguished VIP Analyst & Gartner Fellow

Technology executives must lead in a world seemingly flipped upside down, looking for opportunities and acting to create value. In the Opening Keynote, Mbula Schoen, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner and Hung LeHong and Daryl Plummer, distinguished VPs Analysts and Gartner Fellows, explained how CIOs and IT executives can learn to lead from anywhere, nurture connections to build ecosystems and reach beyond today's knowns to create greater value.

Key Takeaways

• "An overwhelming majority of employees prefer hybrid work. This is forcing CIOs to challenge previous assumptions and implement radical flexibility at scale."

• "Focus on three things to attract and retain IT talent: design a human-centric workplace; harness the power of business technologists; and build an internal talent marketplace.

• Gartner research shows that 41% of employees identify as business technologists, meaning they report outside of IT departments and create technology or analytics capabilities for internal or external business use.

• "Getting it right with business technologists is about having the right enabling technologies and the right ways of working."

• "We are now in the position to go further and solve world-class problems. But you won't solve these on your own. Sometimes you'll need a good friend, sometimes you'll need a whole village."

• "How will you nurture your connections with partners everywhere?" Focus on three types of connections: one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many."

• "The CIO will need to get really good at building partnerships of all types."

• "The answer to the question "where next" cannot be just in terms of a location or direction - that would be a limitation. "Where" is actually the exploration of how value can be found and seized."

• "CIOs must reach beyond historica insights, legacy business practices and bias to create value."

• "You now have the opportunity to be bold. Reach beyond to the unexpected. Reach beyond to the unimagined."

  Learn more from the Gartner Opening Keynote in the associated Gartner press release.

Signature Series: The Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2022

Presented by David Groombridge, VP Analyst, Gartner

Strategic technology trends have significant disruptive potential and set the stage for innovation over the next five years. In his session, David Groombridge, VP Analyst at Gartner, advised CIOs to examine the business impact of this year's trends and adjust business operations appropriately or risk losing competitive advantage to those who do.

Key Takeaways

• "The Gartner Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2022 span three core themes: engineering trust, sculpting change and accelerating growth."
  

• Generative AI: Machine learning methods that learn about content or objects from their data, and use it to generate brand-new, completely original, realistic artifacts.

• Data Fabric: A flexible, resilient integration of data across platforms and business users that simplifies an organization's data integration infrastructure and improves data usage.

• Distributed Enterprise: With the rise in new working patterns, traditional office-centric organizations are evolving into distributed enterprises comprised of geographically dispersed workers.

• Cloud-Native Platforms: CNPs use the core capabilities of cloud computing to provide scalable and elastic IT-related capabilities "as a service" to technology creators using internet technologies, delivering faster time to value and reduced costs.

• Autonomic Systems: Self-managing physical or software systems that learn from their environments and can rapidly adapt to new conditions in the field, much like humans.

• Decision Intelligence: A practical discipline used to improve decision making by explicitly understanding and engineering how decisions are made and outcomes evaluated, managed and improved by feedback.

• Composable Applications: A composable application architecture empowers fast, safe and efficient application changes in a continuously evolving business environment.

  Learn about 5 more strategic trends and additional details on each one in the associated Gartner press release.

What Workers Want: 10 Take-Aways From the 2021 Gartner Digital Worker Survey

Presented by Whit Andrews, Distinguished VP Analyst, Gartner

Gartner surveyed more than 7,000 digital workers about how and where they work and what technologies they use. In this session, Whit Andrews, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner, shared key findings of the 2021 Gartner Digital Worker Survey and insights into what workers need.

Key Takeaways

• "2020 was a phenomenal year as digital workers seized the opportunity to be heroes through the pandemic - they learned new technologies, tools and earned a future powering variety."

• "18% of global digital workers have increased their work time on portable and mobile devices."

• "Hybrid work is generating new formats of workplaces."

• "Meeting fatigue is a myth. In 2021, only 2.5% more time is being spent on meetings as compared to 2019."

• "Virtual meetings are challenging - 41% meetings are taking place virtually in 2021, compared to 19% in 2019."

  Read more about this in the press release Gartner Survey Reveals 50% of Indian Hybrid Workers Consider Themselves More Productive When Working Remotely.