Biz Systems Magic, the first conference for business systems leaders, by business systems leaders has officially concluded. It was an incredible day with sessions from the systems leaders of today’s hottest companies: Google, Slack, Zendesk, Workday, StitchFix, SeatGeek, Fastly, Elastic, and many more.
Business Systems is something that generally the greater world has no knowledge about. People know what IT is, and understand the business functions: Marketing, Sales, HR etc. But Business Systems is just specific enough that it will take some explaining.
I’d like to think of this conference as Business System’s debut. And thanks to the amazing sessions by all of the members of the community, Phil Wainwright, a recognized authority on cloud computing as a blogger, analyst, speaker and consultant since 1998 certainly has a very good grasp of it now.
He wrote in his article on Diginomica, Getting to know business systems, the new IT kids on the block:
In the run-up to this gathering of self-styled business systems specialists, I’d conceived of this emergent role as a kind of formalization of shadow IT. These people have settled on ‘business systems’ and ‘business technology’ to describe what they do because it emphasizes the contrast with the old world of ‘information systems’ and ‘information technology’.
They see themselves as embedded in the business and focused on its goals, rather than operating in a discrete functional silo. But when the conference opened with a session led by two CIOs, it brought the bigger picture into focus.
He continues that the Business Systems movement clearly didn’t come from out of nowhere:
I realized this movement is the latest iteration of the multi-year quest for alignment between the IT function and its business partners. The business systems model is far more radical and transformative than earlier attempts, but it is born of necessity.
It is forged under the pressure of three powerful trends reshaping the nature of IT — the mainstreaming of SaaS for application delivery, the rise of agile and DevOps approaches to IT delivery, and customer demands for increasing agility and responsiveness in business delivery.
Wainwright goes on to explore the business systems role and what created it. From the keynote with six-time CIO Mark Settle and current CIO of Coupa, Eric Tan, it became clear just how new the phenomenon of business systems was. But is this just a Silicon Valley trend? Wainwright says he thinks not.
Read the rest of Phil Wainwright’s article on Diginomica >
Stay tuned: slides and recaps of each session to come to systematic.workato.com in the following weeks!
