UPDATED 03:55 EDT / NOVEMBER 01 2016

NEWS

Forrester: CIOs will put the pedal to the metal in 2017

Chief information officers will move rapidly to embrace emerging technologies as they try to keep up with today’s empowered consumer, Forrester Research Inc. says in its latest report.

The report, “2017 CIO Predictions: CIOs Push For Speed Amid Volatility“, reveals that the days of stability and predictability in the business world are long gone, and argues that CIOs will be forced to respond swiftly to a business environment that’s set to change faster than ever in 2017. As a result, CIOs will push for the rapid adoption of new technologies and the fostering of more agile development models in their businesses.

Forrester says that consumers are the main driving force behind this rapid change, and the most successful businesses of tomorrow will be those that are most “obsessed” with serving their customer’s needs.

“Empowered customers are driven by today’s culture of experimentation, a lust for recognition, and an ever-growing number of devices and information streams,” the report notes. “This evolution will accelerate through 2017 as the expectations of people become even more insatiable, putting pressure on all of your firm’s operations. In 2017, expect firmwide operational changes to focus on customer experience — and an increasing number of wholesale business model changes to focus on specific customer journeys.”

As such, Forrester reckons CIOs will increasingly strive for speed and flexibility in re-designing core business functions. On the operations front, this will mean changes such as the re-allocation of slow-growing budgets to focus on newer technologies that help to win, serve and meet the needs of customers, and the embracing of agile programming and DevOps software deployment methodologies for faster delivery of new projects. New talent sources will emerge as well, with CIOs looking to augment existing recruitment drives with more outsourcing, promiscuous partnering and moving teams to geographical regions where they’re better able to attract the required talent.

In addition, CIOs will also need to leverage new technologies in order to drive the speed of innovation and faster time to market, particularly open-source technologies, Forrester says. “Open source already plays an important role for the technology team,” the report notes. “In 2017, we see that role expanding into areas such as product-related software, customer experience, and process solutions, that need to cut across business and technology silos.”

CIOs to drive technology adoption

Meanwhile, chief executives will demand that their CIOs become obsessed with serving customers, and that means steering their companies to adopt business technologies that drive both speed and agility. As a result, CIOs will drive enterprise adoption of the following technologies, Forrester predicts:

Cloud

Forrester reckons that cloud will become critical to the evolving consumer and product ecosystems. Cloud technologies are already being used to reduce complexity by some forward-thinking CIOs, while many companies have used cloud as a strategic enabler for their digital business plans. Looking ahead to 2017, Forrester reckons will CIOs will take a more prominent role in their companies’ cloud strategies, orchestrating ecosystems and connecting every aspect of their business to better serve customers. New technologies and philosophies such as containers and DevOps will propel that transition, as many enterprises evolve from being cloud users to cloud companies themselves, as companies like GE and Robert Bosch have already, Forrester predicts.

Open source

Open-source technologies will be central in speeding up innovation and faster time-to-market. The foundation of this will be the open-source OpenStack cloud platform, and other popular open-source platforms that provide scalability and access to vibrant developer communities, which in turn leads to new ways of speeding up innovation. Forrester predicts that the majority of developers and development organizations will adopt OpenStack in 2017, most especially in areas linked to the development of customer experience, product and process software.

Internet of Things

The Internet of Things is fast becoming a real ‘thing’ and that means adoption will move beyond the experimental stage. Forrester notes that although IoT adoption rates remain low outside of the industrial, automotive, and B2B industries, this will soon change. CIOs in 2017 will be focused on creating differentiated experiences for their customers, and this will lead to the creation of “structured IoT approaches for more diverse use cases”, Forrester said. This will lead to the creation of business insights at every level of the organization, and mark the beginning of the merger of physical and virtual worlds.

Augmented reality and artificial Intelligence

Augmented reality and artificial intelligence will start making their presence felt in 2017. While AR finally hit the headlines for real with last year’s admittedly short-lived Pokemon Go craze, it hasn’t yet had much of an impact in the enterprise. But Forrester says that will change in the next year as CIOs team up with customer experience and marketing departments to brainstorm ideas on how to use these new technologies. And it reckons that most will go down the route of weaving AR into mobile apps to deliver more personalized shopping and enhanced ownership experiences to their customers. As for AI, Forrester says CIOs will demand that this is increasingly integrated into existing applications to deliver greater insights and drive further innovation.

Image credit: Unsplash via pixabay

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