The Skills you'll need to succeed according to Gartner

At the Orange Live 2010 the most covered keynote was Peter Sondergaard, SVP at Gartner's 'what's hot for IT and Consumers'. We've covered pretty much most of the content from the event here on this blog. I'm pretty sure a lot of what was said by Sondergaard has already been covered, but I found a small point on the skills that Sondergaard suggested will be the key to success in the workplace, very interesting;

Vendor Management skills; the first skill that Sondergaard stated was the ability to manage you partners and suppliers successfully. With the advent of Cloud computing and virtualization, the ability to perform all the required functions is limited to a few huge organizations, so the need to partner is key to success. To offer blended solutions to consumers requires an ability to manage affectively the partners involved.

Business Intelligence; Sondergaard spoke about how data that is not seen as critical now will be come valuable in the future. Sondergaard didn't call it 'meta data' but I'm guess that's what he meant, data that is collected or created as a result of another transaction. Sondergaard suggested that traditional business models will therefore become obsolete as the data that has to be managed evolves.

Within the Orange group there are R&D units working on some pretty cool technologies and also working with some of the data that Orange makes available through API's. The ability to understand the importance of this new data and understand how this data can be built upon can provide new revenue streams.

Relationships skills; these skills can be translated to social skills, the ability to build relationships.  There's a close relationship to the first skill, Vendor management as it's all about the relationship between a business and its partners. To develop the business growing a strong relationship is key to the success of that business.

Something I've mentioned in earlier posts is the importance of trust. Trust plays a huge part in a relationship both with your partners and your customers. You can't build a relationship without trust. Therefore, in the same way it's important to build trust as a brand and subsequently with your consumers, it's important to build trust with your partners as well.

Picture from Benjamin Ellis' flickr