Gartner Hackathon Info

The Adaptability Advantage:

The Role of IT

A management hackathon sponsored by Gartner and the MIX

The Adaptability Challenge

We live in a world of punctuation with limited equilibrium, where the future is less of an extrapolation of the past and more of a realization of innovation and new ideas. This is a world where adaptability becomes advantage.

New combinations of technology, competition, and communications are causing fundamental change in venerable institutions and hundred-year-old business models. The pace of change that we thought unsustainable even 5 years ago is constantly being accelerated making the most important question for any organization is this: are we changing as fast as the world around us? For most organizations, the answer would be no.

Adaptability is a fundamental challenge and a potential source of competitive advantage for every organization. That is why it is the focus of Gartner Executive Programs and the MIX’s first management hackathon.

Technology has created change and is the path to adaptable solutions.

Technology gives organizations new tools to imagine organizations that are large but not bureaucratic, that are focused but not myopic, that are specialized but not balkanized, that are efficient but not inflexible and, best of all, that are disciplined but not disempowering.

IT executives and their teams are uniquely positioned to “future proof” their enterprise. Their understanding of emerging technologies—whether those be Web 2.0, cloud computing, mobile services, social media or big data analysis—can be leveraged not only to enable new business models, but more fundamentally to reinvent far more resilient management models.

But how do IT executives work constructively with the businesses they serve to function as a catalyst for adaptability and strategic change?

What are the practices, attitudes, insights, tools and techniques that IT leaders should be using to drive greater levels of enterprise adaptability?

How can they help ensure that new technologies—and the principles that undergird them (from transparency to autonomy to flexibility)—are truly embedded in how organizations set direction, allocate resources, allocate tasks, evaluate people, and perform all the work of management?

The Management Hackathon

Gartner and the Management Innovation eXchange (MIX) are inviting a select group of IT leaders to crack the adaptability challenge through a hackathon—an online problem-solving event that will harness the collective intelligence of participants from around the world.

The hackathon will be a hands-on, collaborative effort focused on finding, developing, and eventually implementing real-world solutions that can be experimented with in our companies—not someday, but today. It is based on the MIX’s groundbreaking methodology that will help participants:

• Diagnose the barriers to adaptability—what are the most significant roadblocks to proactive change? What are the root causes?
• Distill the essential management principles for building adaptable organizations. You will help uncover a set of new management tenets that will help organizations change as fast as change itself
• Jointly invent management hacks—radical yet practical ideas for how IT can spur the entire enterprise into becoming more adaptable

The IT functions that will be most relevant to the enterprise in the future are those that enable the entire organization to evolve faster than their competitors—and by joining this hackathon, you will learn how to do just that. During this exclusive event, you will also have a chance to:

• Work on solving a truly pressing problem, giving IT leaders the opportunity to play a truly strategic role in their companies;
• Collaborate with an exclusive peer group of IT leaders;
• Learn from leading thinkers and practitioners, including Professor Gary Hamel (co-founder of the MIX) and Mark McDonald (Group vice president and Head of Research, Gartner Executive Programs);
• Receive an exclusive briefing from Gartner, focused on finding ways to turn hacks into real-world management;
• Be recognized as a management innovator at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando, October 2012.

Getting started

The hackathon will kick off on April 12 and the bulk of the work will be concluded in June. To sign up for the event, and receive updates and exclusive content in preparation, please register now.