One of the great things about agenda building is the creative process that looks at Gartner's related research areas and selects the topics and analysts to present at the upcoming Summit. Our pre-event survey told us your top 10 strategic issues.



So our team put together an agenda that contains some of the favorite sessions from past Summits -"back by popular demand" -

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As the pressure to remain profitable in a tough economy mounts, companies are turning to open innovation techniques, such as idea marketplaces, as a source of new ideas. Reaching out to an idea marketplace doesn't mean you don't have smart people in your organization, it just means you are actively seeking innovation from outside of the 'four walls.' Many firms have engaged with idea marketplaces and been very pleased with results. But many others are concerned about the potential risk of "open innovation."

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At the London Summit, the trend for "controversial" keynote speakers continues. Tara Brabazon is an Australian-born academic and researcher who has written 10 books, including "The University of Google." Her ideas are intriguing and timely. She writes and speaks thoughtfully about the challenges of "education in the (post) information age." She does not discourage her students from using online sources, far from it, but she does insist that they understand the provenance of sources, how to think critically about them, how to actually use search engines besides Google to get better quality results and yes, remind them that a trip to the library is not going to kill them. She makes a case for both "the wisdom of crowds" and for peer-reviewed and refereed sources, when appropriate. Her points apply equally well to a business audience.

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Who is Larry Sanger? What the heck is Citizendium, you might ask? Isn't Wikipedia the last word in user-created content? Citizendium is Sanger's new project, which many say is not, will not be and cannot be as "successful" as Wikipedia. Therein lies the attrraction of Sanger and the questions that he raises. What is the nature of success in the Web 2.0 world? Is it quantity or quality? Is there room for expert opinion? Is anonymity really a good thing, given the flame wars that have broken out over the more politically sensitive entries in Wikipedia? Sanger has always maintained two things that are counter to the founding principles of Wikipedia: Anonymity is bad because it allows bad behavior with no consequences; and experts, peer review and editorial control are necessary to maintain quality. Sanger has thoughtful and considered opinions that sometimes run counter to the conventional wisdom of the 2.0 world. Personally, I'm always worried when EVERYONE seems to be saying the same thing and gets wholesale behind people or projects that can then "do no wrong." Sanger has a slightly different view, well worth considering.

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Michael B. Johnson is an innovation and collaboration software chief at Pixar. He describes himself as a person who makes software that helps people to collaborate, to help people make great movies like Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. His focus is on the criticality of story. Despite the power of IT, he points out, Pixar is driven by story. For example, he says, IT allows them to do anything they choose in terms of shot angles or "camera" tracking. So the question becomes not how to use the shots they have, but how the story drives the shots they'll develop. He talks also about the criticality of picking stories by allowing pitches and passion to drive the sense of excitement that drives commitment in workers. Workers choose whether to work on a movie, for example, and it's the passion of the director that drives that. Michael will include video in his keynote to punctuate issues like how innovation emerges from experience and collaboration.

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Here are the collective thoughts from the three Summit chairs on the themes for this fall's Summit.

The Web 2.0 phenomena continues to spread and influence Gartner's clients, with collaboration and social software being important categories for potential investment during the coming years. These investments are not yet large by the standards of the megavendors, with 57% investing between $10k and $500K in the coming year. However, it's significant to note that 21% of companies will invest $1 million or more in such software this year. Moreover, 45% say they will increase their spending in 2009 and 46% will stay the same. The numbers certainly aren't going down. Still, businesses remain interested in the traditional benefits that information systems can bring as a means to justify these investments, with cost control, speed of decision making, and employee productivity being the top three reasons they cite for investment.

In parallel with the rise of Web 2.0 and all its attendant hoopla, we have seen the rise of another phenomena: the continued and growing interest in governance, risk mitigation and compliance, with a plethora of regulations and laws.

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There has been a lot written lately regarding social networks. Gartner analyst and PCC presenter Anthony Bradley discusses the challenges enterprises face in implementing social networks.

There has also been a lot of buzz in our analyst community on adapting the software to fit the community – not a one-size-fits-all approach.

The PCC Summit has five presentations just focused on social networks. Make sure you sign up soon!

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I’ve known Chris White since 1995, when he was running a listserv humor list with no visible business model – what was up with that, Chris? – and I was reading my email using America Online on a Packard Bell that came from Montgomery Ward, which was having a sale. Chris had this idea, which was that he was kind of funny but that a bunch of people he didn’t know well were REALLY funny. And that if he could use Their Funny, he could be funny too. After discarding cannibalism and Electronic Brain Transfers as ways of getting access to their senses of humor, he settled on what we now call user-generated content.

That’s right: It was 1995, and Chris had stumbled on a critical Internet trick: Leverage other people’s desire to excel to help everyone. Before LinkedIn or FaceBook were even ideas, Chris had found something really slick. He sent out topics on which he wanted snappy one-liners to a group of people, collected their answers, pitched out the lame ones and ranked the good ones, and hey presto – he had a great list of funny lines on topics like The Top Five Ways To Tell Someone Their Fly Is Unzipped, or – from 2001! - The Top Five Unforeseen Effects of a Hollywood Writer’s Strike.

I wrote about this a long time ago, at Internet World magazine, in a column titled Five Easy Pieces. (It’s still out there in its Web cryostation, waiting for readers to throng it and make it feel all thawed and loved again.) And now, at the conference, I’ll get to interview Chris live about how he’s done it – and what’s going to do next.

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Posted by: Debra Logan, Research VP

E-discovery is a topic that continues to attract lots of client interest. With fines and sanctions under the new rules of civil procedure running at about 20 times the rate of procecutions under Sarbanes-Oxley and other recent compliance legislation, clients are right to be concerned. The masses of unstructured content that have been saved over the years is being requested more frequently by opposing counsel and regulators. Those that thought that the "inaccessibility" provision would save them should note that judges are ruling that most data and content, even if its old and expensive to restore, is "accessible" after all.

Now, if you have no idea what I’m talking about in the preceding paragraph, it might be time to talk to your security staff, your Exchange administrators, your compliance department or even your in-house counsel. Whether you get sued a lot or a little bit, litigation is a way of life for many companies and an increasingly large burden is falling on IT. Why? Because evidence is digital. E-mail, content on file servers, Excel spreadsheets, transactional data, tape archives - all are fair game under the recently revised rules.

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Posted by: Matt Cain, Research VP

Some days we love e-mail – when we can send that presentation out to 30 people moments before the due date, and some days we hate it, like when we get back from a two-week holiday. But e-mail issues run even deeper: companies are struggling to define retention programs – what they should keep, what they should get rid of – and trying to balance demands from users who want to keep everything forever, and lawyers who advise companies to get rid of mail as soon as possible. And companies are struggling to help users who bitterly complain about e-mail overload. At the PCC conference, we’ll have numerous sessions covering all aspects of e-mail, including a case study from Volvo Cars, which is one of the few companies that has actually solved the e-mail overload issue.

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Posted by: David Gootzit, Research Director

Determining the most important issues currently facing our clients is a constant challenge for any Gartner analyst. One topic that’s been coming up frequently in the last six months during client conversations is how to determine and then demonstrate that a portal deployment is successful. Portal administrators and owners want to know if their baby is healthy and if its not, what can be done to fix it. Determining the health of an existing portal implementation requires going beyond an examination of login statistics. I’m currently working on a presentation for the Summit titled “Healthier Portals: A Health Check And The Cures You Need,” where I’ll provide guidance around this important topic.

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It’s very important to me as a Gartner analyst that our clients outcompete companies who aren’t our clients. That’s at the heart of pretty much all the research I write and all the interactions I have with my clients: Will what I am telling them help them beat the Other Guy in the marketplace? This conference is about that, too – but it also has an important additional component, which is helping individuals feel comfortable and confident in the workplace.

Not all areas of our coverage have this as a factor. In our coverage area, dealing with such public and popular things as consumerization and Web portals, I want my conference attendees to go home feeling confident that they know more about the world of Web 2.0 and Internet technologies than maybe, even, they strictly need to. My friend Steve – here’s a blog entry from him here about Web 2.0 – is trying to figure out of lot of this. So am I. I have a Facebook profile now, and a LinkedIn profile –

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Alex Wright will give one of the keynote speeches at the upcoming Summit. He’s the author of a book on the history of information architecture that I read in draft, and that I’ve thought about quite a bit off and on over the last year. I just read a solid article in the New Yorker on retroviruses, and the fact that they’re embedded in our genetic makeup – which makes for a handy way to look at our ancestral past, as well as apparently a way of understanding plagues and their futures. (Steve Johnson, another keynoter, wrote a book on cholera, so I’m always thinking PLAGUE PLAGUE PLAGUE these days.)

Alex’s work isn’t all that different, in some ways. He’s looking back into the history of information architecture – and prehistory as well, frankly – in order to understand the roots of what information architecture is today. I remember other kids in school who didn’t believe in learning history, because they wanted to make the future. (“History is bunk,” they echoed Henry Ford, although honestly I don’t think they said “bunk,” necessarily.) The fact is, there are good reasons to ignore history. If the people who founded Facebook had dwelled on PlanetAll, my guess is that we’d all still be looking only at Myspace pages. But for most of us, the lessons of history are darned handy. I’ve learned a lot from technology cycles, and it has served me well as an analyst, a worker and a consumer. (I just recently decided not to buy a gadget after remembering it is first generation, and first-generation does not intersect well with my temperament.)

Webs that failed and the iterations of the Web we use are critical, then. Alex will give us a sense of our shared past and the abortive pasts that in some cases came from even before we took mouse in hand.

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One of our keynoters, Alex Wright, had a piece in the New York Times recently. It’s on friending, and I intend to read it fully. I’m posting it to my Facebook profile now, where Alex is a friend, and I mean that. On the other hand, should I friend Steven Johnson? Never met the man…but, still…

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Our Spring PCC Summit marketing team is offering a free webkinz to anyone who registers by December 14, 2007! For those of you not familiar with this new "toy craze," Webkinz are stuffed animals from the Ganz gift company that are similar to many other small plush toys, but they come with a special code on their labels that allows access to the "Webkinz World," a website where you can "adopt" a virtual version of the pet for interaction. Webkinz claims there are more than one million registered users of the Webkinz website! The Ganz’ business model is clever. The company has figured out how to sell old-fashioned stuffed toys at a time when children are faced with addictive videogames, iPods and plenty of purely online kid worlds such as Club Penguin. Your companies need to find the same sort of collaboration zone for customers, partners, and employees. At the PCC Summit, we have a whole track of sessions where we discuss the technologies, best practices and organizational changes needed to make this happen! Register now - and get yourself a Webkinz!

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Analysts tend to be lone wolves. We like to think of ourselves as "wolves," anyway. Sometimes, the reality is more like "lone mutts." Or "fairly solitary beagles." Grr. So when I asked to chair this conference, I didn't necessarily foresee all the moving parts that would need to mesh together, at least from time to time, to make this conference happen.

I've been watching movies – I have a Facebook page, and my friends can come look at what I add to my movie rental queue, which kind of creepy but also interesting, as I find it has elevated my choices somewhat, less Sandra Bullocky and more Otto Premingerish, hoo-wah – and I marvel at what producers and directors accomplish in their final products. I saw an awful movie recently, Robert Altman's 3 Women, and then a bizarre piece of work, his M*A*S*H. A few months ago I watched Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and now I'm watching Deadwood, the HBO series which is deeply informed by that movie to the point of occasional homage.

Sorry, back to the point – collaborating is VERY HARD. I sought proposals from practically everybody at Gartner that covers anything but chip fabs, and I ended up with this great big email folder bursting with great ideas. Then I had my own ideas. And then I had ideas from my manager, and other people's managers. And then I had to look at workload – mine, and everyone else's. Suddenly – and believe you me, it was sudden like a kidney stone – I realized that the conference was not putty in my hands, or even Play-Doh. It was more like an erector set, and at that, a yard sale erector set with about 20% of the pieces lost to the bellies of family room-swelling beagles, solitary or otherwise.

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Welcome! I’m the analyst chair for PCC4, which is our code for Portals, Content and Collaboration (the fourth time in the U.S.). I’ll forget myself and use that alphanumeric acronymic code from time to time. Smile and nod, and I’ll get back to English shortly, I swear.

We’re planning fiercely, assigning slots to presentations and assigning speakers to presentations and working out the blurbs and the key issues (those are the questions we try to answer in a presentation) and talking it all through. We use all sorts of collaborative tools to do this, and I wish I could tell you any or all or even some are best practice. They’re not. But we have a blog, and here it is!

Do you remember the first time you talked on a cell phone? “I’m on a cell phone!” you said. “I’m in my car! Hello?”

Same with email, right? “I am writing you an email! This is me, on my computer! Hello?”

This is my – what? My fourth or fifth blog, counting personal ones. Still, I feel the same sometime. This is me blogging! Hello?

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Question: What's the best way to get a Web site running using content management, but on a low budget?

Answer: First, do the "free" stuff so that you save money farther down the line. Figure out what the Web site's going to do for the business. Is it customer service, or sales support, or informational content about the company? Maybe it's an intranet Web site? This is the stage where the enterprise thinks about Web design and visitor volume.

Once all of that's out of the way, enterprises can seek bids with more confidence that vendors won't seek room for additive features later. And they can seek bids based on software and implementation separately, because they'll know what they need and what's to be done.

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