CIO Trend Report 2017
Signals, Drivers, and Scenarios.
- The IT department continues to lose influence over what technology the business adopts. This is the result of IT’s difficulty in addressing the adoption of the last set of mega-trends known as the “SMAC-stack” – Social, Mobile, Analytics, and the Cloud.
- Without a keen awareness of how trends impact the business, and how the business can exploit a trend, the IT department will always be relegated to back-office maintenance work. The problem is that the next, latest and greatest technology is always on the horizon. But just as one seems like it’s about to rise, it fizzles, and another “hot” trend emerges.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- Trend
reports can provide an academic outlook as to what is happening in the
technology landscape, but not much else.
- CIOs need a framework to
develop concrete insight into what the future is likely to bring, and how it
might impact how they operate IT and how their organization does business.
Impact and Result
The role for the CIO moving forward into 2017 will be to help the organization become more proactive about competition and disruption. The CIO can accomplish this by doing the following:
- Scanning the organization’s environment signals in order to spot trends.
- Focusing on the critical uncertainties pertaining to any given trend and analyzing them to determine the art of the possible.
- Building agility into the organization’s technology strategy to make room for discovery.
In 2017, IT can become a center of foresight and innovation for the organization, observing technology trends at their onset and helping shape business strategy.
CIO Trend Report 2017 Research & Tools
CIO Trends Report 2017 – Executive Brief
Read our introduction to
the CIO Trends Report 2017 that contains summaries of our eight key trends.
1. The Digital Ecosystem
New service bundles, cost reduction strategies, ways
for users to self-manage, and opportunities for collaboration are on the
horizon. The Digital Ecosystem is driven by near ubiquitous connectivity,
powered by a meshed network of objects and devices, and the capacity to have
them all access the internet.
2. Automated Cognition
The
business is demanding real-time responses to increasing amounts of
data; this is where the need for an extension of the human mind is born from.
Outsourcing analysis and interpretation of information to a machine is the
response to the human mind’s finite ability to process and react to data in an
expedient manner.
3. Immersive UX
The external environment, through devices, can now be
re-rendered and fitted with an overlay of information that technology users can
observe and interact with. This environment can also be totally immersive,
where users no longer view what is external, and their reality becomes virtual.
These same users can also interact with their technology, physically, in a
broad range of wearable experiences.
4. XaaP (Everything as a Platform)
Organizations can now share their challenges, pain
points, and opportunities, and in doing so, extend their capabilities far beyond
the confines of their “four walls.” The XaaP trend is driven by the convergence
between open data and the proliferation of the Application Programming
Interface (API).
5. Autonomous Machines
Machines represent the opportunity for humankind to eventually
stop having to do any activities deemed to be undesirable on the basis of
physical difficulty, repetition, monotony, and danger. Augmenting the human
physical capability can lead to immense benefit in terms of increased
productivity and locomotion.
6. Distributed Validation
From the trend towards peer reviewing goods and
services online to the social sourcing of news media and information, there is
a growing comfort and appetite for leveraging the collective crowd to help make
individual decisions. This could replace our current system for processing
transactions, moving assets, and any and all other cases where an institution is
a middle-man.
7. Adaptive IT
Business needs have become very diverse and groups are
consuming technology in different patterns. As such, an adaptive IT operating
model must support and enable multiple groups of technology service consumers,
while continuously pivoting to meet changing business conditions and needs.
8. Decentralized Making
Conventional construction and creation is being
challenged. The world of complex logistics, centralized manufacturing, and the
waste it creates coupled with the desire for more flexibility have given rise
to a new trend towards decentralized making.