After a year of global disruptions and digital changes, the Gartner IT Symposium offered particularly relevant insights for CIOs and IT executives seeking more control, value, and efficiency from their technology investments.
Experts from across industries shared their insights and experiences with digital transformation, looking at the different solutions and practices that are helping businesses remain competitive and operate more intelligently.
This year’s event explored three key content streams based on the latest Gartner research: Technology Innovation, Business Strategy, and Leadership. While technology remains a critical component in future-proofing businesses and building resilience, many presentations highlighted the importance of ensuring business strategy and leadership support an organisation’s digital transformation.
Intelligent Solutions to Everyday Challenges
No matter the industry or function, technology innovation continues to grow more extensive, diverse, and complex. Whether through public cloud, edge, converged, hyperconverged, composable, DevOps, virtualisation, containers, automation, monitoring, or AIOps – the wide variety of options and opportunities also present a range of challenges. A critical component of understanding technology innovation is knowing which solution suits each purpose and enterprise.
Composable architecture – enabled through APIs – allows businesses to scale storage, networks, databases, and functionality with greater agility than ever before. During the event, composable enterprise architecture showcased its capabilities for managing disruption, ensuring security, mitigating risks, and anticipating change particularly in times of uncertainty and volatility. The flexible and scalable infrastructure ensures enterprises can respond rapidly to change.
A key takeaway from various sessions was the democratisation of innovation, which has seen edge and cloud computing make intelligent solutions more accessible, easy to implement, and simpler to manage.
Fight Uncertainty With Future-Proof Strategies
Establishing the right business strategy means converging different organisational and industry-wide ecosystems to support dynamic markets and responsive supply networks. Traditional frameworks for connecting businesses to employees, customers, and suppliers were far too linear and rigid. The acceleration of digital business is providing more flexibility and accessibility for organisations facing uncertain growth environments, challenges of geopolitical tensions, and shifting regulatory frameworks.
This is also impacting the future of work as people and processes become more interconnected, driving innovation and efficiency across all user touchpoints and channels. Organisations are changing the way people do their jobs, using intelligent, innovative, and often cloud-based solutions that adapt and evolve with business needs and strategies.
The role of CIOs has changed significantly as technological capabilities and user expectations shift. Today, IT executives and technology leaders have the resources to make more strategic business decisions and take a broader view of strategy, spending, and growth.
Leadership’s Role in Digital Innovation
The expansion of data and analytics is reengineering decision-making for organisations as strategic decisions become more interconnected, contextual, continuous, and complex. Business technology leaders in attendance demonstrated how they utilise data, making sense of the vast amounts of data generated by the minute to forecast and plan with more comprehensive insights.
Another key takeaway for IT executives is their crucial role in nurturing innovation, creating diversity and equity, and subsequently building more adaptive, versatile, and future-ready workforces. By being more inclusive and creative in recruitment and retention, technology leaders can help bridge skill gaps while driving innovation due to more dynamic and diverse talent pools.
Many business leaders used the pandemic’s disruption as a launchpad for renewal and optimisation. As seen during several sessions, CIOs must be more holistic in how they plan, manage, and improve their businesses. This means managing change and culture during technology implementation and adaptation to ensure the best outcomes for all.
Boomi Success Story Showcase
Boomi hosted two sessions during the event, demonstrating how the right solution can accelerate digitalisation and experience-driven efficiency. These presentations also highlighted the importance of partnering with the right technology provider, ensuring implementation and integration are aligned with overarching business strategy.
The first Boomi session, “Ampol Removes a “Spaghetti Junction” to Aid Historic Rebrand“, highlighted the importance of enterprise-wide transformation backed by a strategic vision. Ampol Australia’s rebrand presented an opportunity to make significant structural changes and digital implementations, partnering with Boomi to introduce architecture principles and governance that ensured the architecture was reusable and service based.
With two-tier architecture, Ampol now provides users with access to data replication services and an integration centre of excellence. The organisation is supported by an agile and scalable framework that has consolidated various integrations into a single source of truth, providing transparency across the business. Data is now handled and managed automatically, eliminating manual processing and potential human errors to ensure consistency across all channels.
The second Boomi session, “How to Deliver at Speed a Seamless Digital Experience with Integration“, was a roundtable discussion between Boomi and WLTH, exploring how the lending and payment fintech implemented a data master hub to provide a single-view customer interface that’s easy to use.
WLTH’s partnership with Boomi helped the business create a seamless digital customer experience with speed and scale. While most enterprise-level businesses are utilising various platforms, applications, and solutions to achieve success – these tools often leave data siloed by platform, infrastructure, or process when not supported by an intelligent integration platform like Boomi AtomSphere.
Accelerating Digital Business With Boomi
With the various challenges and opportunities explored during the event, Boomi showcased various solutions to help businesses create more intelligent, robust, and efficient IT frameworks. Whether a business was looking to improve scalability and innovation or simplify the way different applications and systems connect, Boomi guided various attendees through the different technologies designed to help them operate at their best.
For businesses looking towards composable enterprise architecture, Boomi API Management demonstrated how users can design, reuse, and scale APIs with ease. This allows businesses to drive digitalisation through the rapid adoption of applications providing new functionality and seamless experiences across every channel – making data readily available and actionable.
As many organisations struggle to consolidate disparate applications and systems, Boomi shines. The Boomi integration platform as a service (iPaaS) was positioned as a Leader in Gartner’s 2021 Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise iPaaS for the eighth consecutive year.
Attendees of the event were shown how this cloud-native, high productivity integration solution has aided businesses by easily and cost-effectively supporting all application and data integration needs – helping to modernise or eliminate slow, costly, and inflexible legacy systems.
A special thanks to everyone who attended or connected with Boomi during the event. Gartner and Boomi remain dedicated to informing and inspiring technology leaders across industries.
Learn how Boomi solutions can help CIOs and IT executives accelerate digital business here.
About the Author
Nathan Gower is Managing Director, Boomi Australia & New Zealand