Dan and Tom discuss Tom's observations and learnings from the 2024 Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies conference in Las Vegas. 
AI and improving Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) leadership were key themes, with sessions addressing strategic and tactical approaches for technology, business, and staffing issues. The I&O outlook for 2025 and beyond was optimistic, while acknowledging executive frustrations with the increasing costs of cloud, failures of major projects, and the disruptions generated from CVEs and other security events. 
Key Ideas

- **Generative AI**: Gartner believes that we are still in the early days with respect to AI, with many immediate opportunities for productivity improvements that need to be balanced with potential risks and unpredictable costs, highlighting the lack of best practices and challenges moving from a POC to production.
- **Automation & Orchestration**: Automation teams need to focus on value to their customers, prioritizing efforts to orchestrate business processes over tactical task automation. Automation leaders should adopting Agile development processes and metrics for managing their team's efforts.

- **I&O Agile Adoption**: Highlighting enterprises that have introduced Infrastructure Platform Engineering (IPE) and Site Reliability Engineering(SRE), Gartner recommends restructuring the infrastructure organization around these disciplines, looking holistically at the infrastructure as a managed platform, and adopting product management thinking as a framework for managing the evolution of the environment.
- **Digital Employee Experience (DEX)**: Building on feedback from corporate boards, Gartner highlighted staffing and skill shortages as a workforce risk and impediment to business transformation initiatives, which is leading to an evolution in employee tools and rethinking about management approaches to improve employee engagement job satisfaction. 
- **I&O Leadership**: I&O leaders need to become more strategically-focused and proactive in managing their portfolios, aligning their priorities with key business initiatives and building up the confidence and trust of the executive team in I&O. 
Takeaways
- Prepare for integrating the new AI-driven tools and data flows integrating into the infrastructure
- Find ways to use AI tools that help with day-to-day activities, but make sure that there are checks of the AI-generated results
- Shifting to Infrastructure as Code approaches to make updates to the environment can reduce risks and improve security
- Collect and review metrics for the customer experience, not just technology operations
- Agile retrospectives can be a powerful learning mechanism for improving staff skills and performance
- Allocate time to skill development for yourself and your team, consider where upskilling is more effective and quicker than hiring
- Be prepared to discuss the value of I&O projects in the context of business initiatives, not just the technical results that they provide
Show Links
[Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference](https://www.gartner.com/en/conferences/na/infrastructure-operations-cloud-us)
[AI and the Future of Work, Paul Redmond](https://paul-redmond.co.uk/speaking/)
[Transformational Leadership, Carla Harris](https://www.carlaspearls.com)
[Super-Communicators, Charles Duhigg](https://www.charlesduhigg.com/supercommunicators)