Sydney Summit Portends What's Important In 2016

I just returned from Sydney, Australia, where I attended the Gartner Business Intelligence, Analytics and Information Management Summit.  Sydney is the first of seven Gartner BI and Analytics Summits that take place throughout the globe each year. As such I find the Sydney Summit to be a great opportunity to learn where the Gartner BI, Analytics and Information Management analysts are leaning-in for 2016 and beyond. Here are some of the things I learned.

Keynote Reveals Key Trends

Gartner analysts Ted Freidman and Kurt Schlegel kicked-off the Summit with their keynote,Information and Analytics Leadership: Empowering People with Trusted Data.This session was a fantastic synthesis of the latest data and analytics trends coalescing in three key data and analytics imperatives summarized below.

• Focus More on Business Outcomes-Given so many new technologies on top of existing IT complexity, this pragmatic counsel helps clear away the technology noise. Towards this imperative, Ted and Kurt advised that everydata conversationshould be abusiness conversation. I really like this powerful, yet easy-to-apply filter. For me, a highlight of this section was a video that showcased Cisco customer Monsanto who is using Cisco Data Virtualization to drive significantly better business outcomes for both Monsanto and their customers.

• Radical Market Forces Driving Business and IT Change-Ted and Kurt identifed a number of companies that are moving from data consumers to data providers driving new data monetization revenue streams and business models. Further, inside these firms and others, new buying models are upsetting traditional IT-Vendor interactions. And across industry sectors, analytics are becoming a major competitive weapon as noted in this Gartner Strategic Planning Assumption,"Gartner Says More Than Half of Large Organizations Will Compete Using Advanced Analytics and Proprietary Algorithms by 2018."

• Trust and Security -With so much internal and external data more readily available, which data can I trust? This has become a critical question for users. And how do we secure this data? This has become a critical question for IT. With data quality an area of deep research for Ted over the past ten years, it was great to hear his evolving thoughts on this important subject area.

Gartner's Recipe for Success

Fortunately Ted and Kurt were also willing to provide practical advice on how to prosper from these trends. Their keynote closed with five pragmatic recommendations including:

• "Anchor your efforts in business outcomes
• Prove you can increase information yield
• Accept that the world will get more distributed
• Shift your thinking from truth to trust
• Increase the urgency on information security"

More Sessions, More Drill Down

Along with the keynote, I was able to participate in eight different Gartner analyst-led sessions. Several sessions were technology deep dives on topics such as Machine Learning, Internet of Things and Apache. And several more covered higher order topics such as Enterprise Information Management, Self-Service Data Preparation, Data-as-a-Service and Bi-Modal IT.

Beyond the sessions, the event also provided a great way to talk with several Gartner analysts one on one about Cisco's relevance and offers in today's more-critical-than-ever data and analytics environment.

Additional Gartner Summits Around the Corner

I wish I had the space to cover even more that I learned. But you can also gain these insights directly from Gartner by attending an upcoming summit. While it may be too late to get to this week's London summit, there is still a chance you can participate in the Gartner Business Intelligence & Analytics Summit on March 14-16 in Grapevine, Texas.Cisco will have a large presence there as described in Kevin Ott's recent blog. I'll be there as well, along with a number of my Cisco Data and Analytics colleagues. We would enjoy the chance to talk with event attendees. We hope to see you there!

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Learn More from My Colleagues

Check out the blogs of Mala Anand, Mike Flannagan and Kevin Ott to learn more.