CIO Trend Report 2017

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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.

CIO Trends Report 2017 – Executive Brief

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.