The Emerging Technology Trends according to Forrester

The global "IT everywhere wave" is being powered by the emergence of business technology (BT) — thid is the pervasive technology use that drives business results and that is increasingly under the control of business organizations and not IT. This wave includes the following technologies:

· Technology Populism — Web 2.0 and social networking meet the enterprise. Thanks to an advancing technology-native workforce, ubiquitous broadband, and abundant collaboration and Social Computing tools, information workers can now provision their own software tools, information sources, and social networks via the Web to support their jobs. Individual people, not IT organizations, are fueling the next wave of IT adoption that Forrester calls Technology Populism. New opportunities are emerging, derived from rich social interaction powered by enterprise Web 2.0 tools, but these come with new risks — like compromised security and privacy and poor control of intellectual property.

· The Information Workplace (IW) — complex information delivered in the user's context. The IW is a next-generation digital workplace based on portal, collaboration, content management, and office productivity technologies, plus many emerging technologies in the Web 2.0 and Social Computing space. An IW is quite different from the collaboration, content, and portal products in use in most organizations today because it provides a role-based, contextual, seamless, guided, visual, and multimodal work experience for the user. People in many different roles who are responsible for efforts like enterprise content management, collaboration, office productivity, portals, business intelligence, data warehousing, and BPM report that their organizations are developing IW strategies.

· Dynamic Business Applications — component apps that target certain roles but change easily. IT's primary goal during the next five years should be to invent a new generation of enterprise software that adapts to the business and its work and evolves with it. Forrester calls this new generation Dynamic Business Applications, emphasizing close alignment with business processes and work (design for people) and adaptability to business change (build for change). At this stage, the requirements for Dynamic Business Applications are clearer than the design practices needed to create them. But the tools are at hand, and pioneers in SOA, BPM, and business rules — including independent software vendors — have begun to show us the way.

· Digital Business Architecture — SOA, unified communications, and virtual computing. Digital Business Architecture is a top-level conceptual model for planning the future of both technology and architecture. Digital Business Architecture aligns planning with a new reality: More and more, the technology design must directly reflect the business design. The business goals for each technology domain are the basis for a taxonomy of seven major strategic platforms for digital business: SOA platform, information fabric, interaction platform, Information Workplace, unified communications platform, business service management platform, and business design platform. These strategic platforms provide focal points around which to structure and design a future technology base.

· IT ecosystems — gravity wells of products and services. Market forces of commoditization, miniaturization, industrialization, and globalization, along with changing buyer sentiments, will accelerate a shift in the dominant form of IT delivery by 2012 — from buyers self-integrating technology to having outside providers assemble and manage it. These four underlying drivers aren't new, but their convergence will accelerate this market shift and make it stick, with stable operations farmed out to third parties, new IP sourced from open communities and solution brokers, emerging technologies going to market wrapped in process bundles, and new software investments based on subscriptions rather than ownership. The resulting IT ecosystem structure will place those technology suppliers with the strongest delivery capabilities at the hubs — IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP.

· Enterprise master data management — addressing cross-app data use and management. Master data management's (MDM's) goal is to deliver trusted data throughout the enterprise. But in an effort to open up access to data while enforcing policies and regulations, today's MDM strategies focus on mitigating the organizational, process, and business case challenges that an enterprisewide, multi-data-domain MDM business capability introduces before considering comprehensive technology architectures. CIOs must recognize and plan for enterprise MDM as a multiyear, multiphase, maturing business capability that will allow the delivery of trusted/quality customer, product, and other critical data.

Source: https://www.forrester.com/Research/PDF/0,5110,46357,00.pdf