I was part of Gartner, the outsourcing and vendor management conference, which took place in Orlando, Florida from September
12th to 14th. Common Sense was part of the ExportAr booth representing Argentina. It was a great and very important event and I learned a lot of interesting things.
The aim of this conference was to achieve outsourcing excellence through Vendor Management, Cloud Sourcing and Emerging Trends. Here are the highlights of my experience:
– First I would like to emphasize the references to the “Y” generation which is one of the trends that are reshaping the IT future. This generation is made up of young people who are part of the new workforce. They are much more demanding because they live IT and are testing its procedures daily. Organizations must be prepared to deal with this new generation of experts.
– Another important issue was how to deliver value. Attendees discussed how to demonstrate the added value of a service to clients and justify further investment. Learning how to improve control, reduce risk and derive more value from your vendors were the most important topics of the summit.
– Then, the discussion turned to the reasons why projects sometime fail. Often there is misalignment between the company and the customer. The activities are not aligned and they create chaos in the process. In these cases, each company must understand the others business, have a well trained staff and utilize an effective business strategy.
– Another topic that was covered were new options for cloud sourcing. They compared the traditional forms of services outsourcing with the activities of cloud computing. Today, all services are moving to the cloud, i.e. they are industrializing IT services. We must be attentive to this drive to industrialize IT services and develop ways to automating them.
Also, I noticed a strong presence of services and products from Latin America. Nearshore has a stronger present from Latin America than from others regions.
Gartner was a great place to meet new people. I want to thank Brian Britz for his feedback in our one on one conversation and to Gilbert van der Heiden for the tips and recommendations on how to provide better services.
Did you go to Gartner? What were your highlights of this event?