It’s that time of year again! We’re thrilled to be kicking off IT Forum at The Palazzo in Las Vegas with more than 1,100 attendees on site.

You told us loudly and clearly to take on the topic of Business Technology (BT) but to put it in realistic, get-it-done terms. And that’s what we aim to do this week.

Our roster of main stage speakers includes Stephen Gillett, CIO and GM, Digital Ventures, Starbucks; Ursula Burns, Chairman and CEO, Xerox; Roland Paanakker, CIO and VP of Lean Business Solutions, Nike; Joe Eng and Drew Martin, CIOs of JetBlue and Sony Electronics, respectively; and Forrester’s very own George Colony, Ted Schadler, Alex Cullen, and James Staten. Add to that about 80 track sessions and a host of one-on-one opportunities with our analysts, and this adds up to what will be a highly productive and enjoyable event.

If you can’t attend, be sure to check out the highlights of the speeches and the Twitter stream below. And by all means, make sure you get here next year.

Today's Live Stream

9:00 a.m.-9:15 a.m. PST
Welcome And Setting The Stage 
Tom Pohlmann, Vice President, Forrester

9:15 a.m.-10:00 a.m. PST
Keynote Speech: Planning And Delivering The Capabilities Your Business Needs
Alex Cullen, Vice President, Research Director, Forrester

by Tom Pohlmann

Forrester recently hosted our two flagship IT events—IT Forum 2009 in Las Vegas and Berlin.  For those of you who couldn’t attend, I wanted to share one of our keynote presentations by Forrester’s Chairman & CEO George Colony.  George discussed the challenges that will face CEOs coming out of the recession and how IT leaders can step up to the plate and support, and in some cases lead, these efforts.

George outlined the six imperatives that will hit CEOs as follows:

1. Digital will be mandatory:  Move IT to BT.

2. Brand loyalty will decline:  Enable BT to feed social

3. Customers will look very unfamiliar:  Press ahead into new tech – swim in the Y Generation waters

4. The war for people will be intense:  Build attractive internal systems

5. You will sell differently:  Help marketing

6. The way you innovated will die:  Internal tech should enable, not hinder partnerships.

See the full recording of this keynote below:
For more on the subject, please read George’s guest post on The Huffington Post. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how you are engaging with your CEO on these types of initiatives.

Here’s another follow-up post to our recent jam session on using a down economy as an enabler for sustained improvements in IT.
   
One of our calls took on the topic of protecting and promoting innovation -- a big, squishy topic to which a blog post alone can’t do justice.  So let me touch on the highlights.
 
77% percent of our jam session attendees are actively cutting capital spending or planning to do so in the very near future. Not surprising. And 50% said that of the remaining budgets a smaller ratio will be allocated to new, innovative investments. Also not surprising.
 
Within our clients we see plenty of knee jerk cuts of anything with a “new” or “long-term” label attached. I say “knee jerk” because quick use of the scalpel is a just another of those involuntary responses that we’ve grown accustomed to in IT. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing; in some cases, that long-term wish list is exactly what should be cut.
 

We recently held a “jam session” of five teleconferences aimed at moving IT beyond its traditional hunker down mentality in tough times, to instead use this climate as an opportunity to make real improvements in how we run IT.

The first call took on the topic of creating a leaner IT. There’s plenty of research at Forrester on lean thinking, but the term lean is so “in” right now, that I’m seeing multiple definitions emerge. Odds are, someone outside of IT will come knocking on your door asking when you’re going to “get lean.”  Here’s how to answer.