Defrag Blog

Defrag is now officially three weeks away, and I’m starting to feel like a kid on Christmas eve.

But not so much the kid that I miss interesting developments - like this piece from the Gartner Symposium about IT falling “behind the curve.” Gartner argues that there’s a “fundamental mismatch” between what IT is good at and what is happening on the internet. The result is IT departments everywhere losing a grip on what’s actually going on. The “digital natives” are on iPhones, google, facebook, twitter, etc — whether you even KNOW it or not (forget liking). You no longer have 18 months to roll out a collaboration suite. People are routing around the steady pace of the IT department and “rolling their own.”

This is all really just a continuation of what happened when Salesforce.com first launched. IT people everywhere were simply STUNNED by the idea that Billy Joe down in business unit X had simply *bought himself* a license, uploaded sales data, and started using a service that no one had vetted OR approved. Guess what? That’s now everything. And it’s exploding. And it’s only gonna get worse.

The big question in the SaaS world for the last few years has been “how to keep control” - where control means compliance, security, auditing, etc. You can just feel that wave of compliance/audit/security sweeping toward all things in the social computing world (it may be the thing that pushes us into the trough). Look for it next year.

See, and that right there is why if you’re on the fence about Defrag, you should hop off and come join us. Because if you’re anywhere CLOSE to thinking about these issues (and how they intersect with so many other technology touch points), then you need to start seeing what’s coming next.

I’ll try to avoid the “rah-rah” speech, other than to say just how proud and excited I am about this year’s agenda. If you haven’t taken 5 minutes to just look through it, please do so. It’s not your typical agenda.

Come to defrag and find yourself stretched, grounded, inspired and challenged, but mostly, find yourself ahead of the curve. Join us.