Last week I attended Gartner’s EMEA Symposium. Normally held in a large, crowded convention centre in Barcelona it was, of course, virtual this year.
The content of the sessions was much as normal for a Gartner event; insightful, optimistic and visionary. An advantage of the video sessions was that you had the opportunity to replay sessions that clashed with those you attended, and as Gartner generally schedule 9-10 sessions in every time slot I found this to be really beneficial.
The Workshops, Roundtables and 1-1s went ahead as usual, as they fit nicely into a video meeting/call format.
However the randomness of holding a conversation with someone from a different sector, and a different country, and a different organisation size was missing. I generally attend this event for the content but consider these interactions to be a valuable bonus.
There were excellent sessions covering “composable business” (Gartner’s theme for the week, though IBM may have come up with the term in 2014), short-term trends (“People Centricity”, “Location Independence” and “Resilient Delivery”), long-term views (“The majority of citizens in the world are augmented” by 2040), and current issues (COVID, Digital/AI Ethics, AI in general). The guest keynotes by Simon Sinek and Dr. Julia Shaw were also thought-provoking.