Tom ScholtzTom Scholtz


This year’s Gartner Symposium will focus on meeting the challenges of extreme information management

The 2012 Symposium/ITxpo, to be held at the Cape Town International Convention Centre from 28-30 August, will once again bring together top IT leaders to deepen their understanding and sharpen their skills.

“The theme this year is ‘Focus, Connect, Lead’,” says of . “Extreme information management presents CIOs with a whole new set of challenges – and also the opportunity to deepen their leadership. The agenda at this year’s Symposium will help IT leaders look at the real issues, what opportunities there are to connect applications with business and stakeholders, and how they can take a lead in transforming IT in business.”

Scholtz explains that cloud, social, and mobile technologies are coming together in a powerful combination of forces that believes will fundamentally reshape the business and IT landscape in the next five years.

“Individually, each of these technologies is disruptive. Together, they will interact, amplify and accelerate each other to form a nexus that will rival the disruption and magnitude of change caused by the dot-com and e-business era of the late 1990s,” he says. “A new era is emerging in which information will play an increasingly central and critical role in business success and competitive advantage.”

New sources and types of information will arrive with increasing volume, velocity, variety and complexity. Data volumes are already growing exponentially. By the end of this decade, estimates of the number of Internetconnected devices ranges from 50 billion to more than 200 billion — each creating its own stream of data.

But Scholtz says big data is just one of the challenges created by disruptive evolution toward extreme data management.

“IT will need to cope with new technologies and establish a flexible approach to architectures, delivery systems, processes and practices like governance, privacy and to support enterprise goals while addressing the growing demands of end users. For most organisations, this will pose significant challenges,” he says.

On the flipside, new analytical approaches and information management technologies will deliver new insight, support better decisions and create new opportunities for organisations to gain a competitive advantage and exploit new markets to deliver growth.

“Organisations that embrace the challenges for information innovation will see their businesses transformed. It’s the enormous potential of these new kinds of information and the incredible opportunity to leverage it and create innovative value that fuels business success, which we’ll unpack at this year’s Symposium,” says Scholtz.

To help CIOs make things happen inside the organisation, Tina Nunno, VP and distinguished analyst in ’s CIO Research Group, will give a series of presentations on how CIOs can navigate complex decisions and sensitive organisational politics. She will also cover management issues like working with the board of directors, executive communication strategies, change leadership and governance strategies.

For more information and a full agenda, please visit http://www.gartner.co.za.