Forrester has released its research on top technology trends for enterprises to watch from 2011-2013 and I was pleased to get a review copy. Gene Leganza led the excellent research. As he wrote in the summary, “For this year’s list of top trends, we’ve used the same criteria — impact, newness, and complexity — but we’ve modified the categories, merged related topics, added five new trends, and updated all the entries with this year’s perspective.” The categories for this year are: “empowered” technologies, process-centric data and intelligence, agile and fit-to-purpose applications, and smart technology management.
In the survey respondents rated more than 40 technologies for impact to their organization in the next three years. The top 6 were in order: Mobile devices and/or apps (73%), Collaboration/Web 2.0/social media (63%), Business intelligence (62%), Virtualized servers, storage, and/or networks (60%), Security related to wireless and mobile devices (54%), and Software-as-a-service (52%). The percentages are those who rated them strong impact. Supporters of Enterprise 2.0 should be happy with collaboration/Web 2.0/social media coming in at number two.
In addition to technologies they looked at trends and reported the 15 top rated ones. The top five are in order: next-gen BI takes shape, combining real-time access with pervasiveness, agility, and self-service; business rules processing and policy-based SOA move to the mainstream; SaaS and cloud-based platforms become standard; system management enables continued virtualization; and collaboration platforms become people-centric. These were all rated as very high impact.
The fifth trend hits at the core of enterprise 2.0 and others are related in some manner. This trend is predicted to have a very high business impact leading to greater organizational responsiveness to business changes and a moderate IT impact as many of these technologies are integrated into precuts already in use.
The trends are divided into the categories listed above and I was most interested in the category of “empowered” technologies as it also addresses the concepts within enterprise 2.0. I have a review copy of their book, Empowered, and will be writing about it here soon. This book shows the “dramatic impact possible from combining Social Computing, mobile technologies, collaboration platforms, and cloud-based capabilities for rapid deployment of innovative new ideas.” Two of these trends are already mentioned above, SaaS and cloud-based platforms become standard and Collaboration platforms become people-centric.
I find a third trend, customer community platforms integrate with business apps, to be very important. It addresses the social side of business processes. Organizations can use these customer communities to support market research and product development and gain insights from their market for real competitive advantage. I have recently talked with a number of vendors who are working to support this trend. It is predicted that this trend will have a high business impact and low IT impact and I would agree.
There is much more in the report as many other trends are covered and recommendations are made. I am just hitting some of the highlights as they relate to enterprise 2.0. It is a solid and useful work.
Im not that into all this technical stuff, but it would seem like the world is changing so fast these days.
I was telling a friend the other day about a "4D Scan" when you are pregnant and how you can SEE the baby before it's born, in detail.
Not long ago people only had Xrays to do that!
It's amazing! Where will we be in another 10, 20 years time?....
Posted by: Judy Kingston-Smith | November 04, 2010 at 11:39 AM