nadhan-at-gartner-two Click the image above to watch the full presentation.

It is only on rare occasions that you get the benefit of experiencing yourself the message you are delivering as a speaker at a conference.  The Gartner ITXPO Symposium where I delivered the session on Technology Innovation driving Business Differentiation was one such occasion.  Even though I had submitted an abstract about my session several weeks back, the actual content of my presentation continued to grow and take shape even after the conference keynotes had been delivered.  For you see, Collaboration -- as Gartner asserts -- drives the best form of innovation.  Let us just say, that the environment at the Gartner conference was such that there was a continuous injection of innovative themes, ideas and concepts that resulted in thought provoking interactions -- including a casual conversation I had with Chief Gartner Fellow, Daryl Plummer who delivered one of the keynotes.

My session was really on how it takes the trifecta of Business, Technology and Ecosystem to come together to make innovation relevant.  In the video of my session above, I walk through the detail of each of these aspects.  At the end of the video, you can also see a demonstration of how the infrastructure for the Red Hat Open Innovation Labs can be set up by pushing a single button after selecting the components you need.  I experienced several “knowledge moments” which punctuated my draft content for the session. Let me explain.

Business.  I came into the conference with the idea of automating the Business Process to spare innovation cycles and applying Design Thinking principles to innovate the Business Model.  At the conference, I came to know a new term -- Business Moment.  The Business Moment triangulated the Business Process and the Business model as you will see in the video.  Plummer also talked about multiple industries coming together to stimulate innovation -- Wealth Management and Healthcare coming together for Whealth Management.

Technology.  I came in with the idea of innovation applying to Infrastructure, Systems and Applications.  At the conference, I heard Plummer and Hung Le-hong spell out a very simple but powerful message -- Don’t Collect .. Connect! (See Knowledge Moment Two).  This idea opened up the need to modernize integration techniques.  As Gartner Fellow, Massimmo Pezzini states - “CIO Call to Action: Shake Up Your Integration Strategy to Enable Digital Transformation”.  Thus, technology innovation is also about modernizing traditional integration techniques.

Ecosystem. One of the sessions on Sunday at the conference called out Organizational Culture as the biggest threat to innovation.  I took this up as a challenge and augmented my session to address how Culture could actually be a vehicle to instrument change.  Turn it around to our advantage!

The whole theme of my session was about the need for a thriving ecosystem of collaboration to make technology innovation relevant to realize tangible business outcomes.  The Gartner conference is clearly one such ecosystem -- the knowledge shared at this conference stimulates new ways of thinking.  The conference also provides an excellent opportunity to showcase innovative solutions like the push-button infrastructure and container based CI/CD to an audience of forward thinking but pragmatic leaders -- clearly proven by the conversations I had after my session!

Please click on the video link and feel free to reach out to me at LinkedIn and Twitter to continue the dialog.  If you have any specific questions on the Red Hat Open Innovation Labs, you are more than welcome to click here.


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