CIO
—
"The only constant is change," said the great science-fiction author and biochemist Isaac Asimov. And few industries change as rapidly as the technology space.
On the enterprise side, where slimmed-down IT budgets, economic downturns and traditional thinking can stifle change, evolving technologies and the necessary strategies to address those changes still persist at a rapid clip.
In a recent Forrester report entitled "The Top 10 Technology Trends
EA Should Watch: 2012 To 2014", the research firm gauged 208 IT executives with knowledge of their companies' technology strategies to see what areas they expect to change most during the next three years.
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CIO
—
"The only constant is change," said the great science-fiction author and biochemist Isaac Asimov. And few industries change as rapidly as the technology space.
On the enterprise side, where slimmed-down IT budgets, economic downturns and traditional thinking can stifle change, evolving technologies and the necessary strategies to address those changes still persist at a rapid clip.
In a recent Forrester report entitled "The Top 10 Technology Trends
EA Should Watch: 2012 To 2014", the research firm gauged 208 IT executives with knowledge of their companies' technology strategies to see what areas they expect to change most during the next three years.
The survey also asked about the areas in which these IT execs expect to see the most business value in the next three years. Business intelligence (BI), mobile apps and application platforms won out as the top three areas for change and increased business value.
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Other leading areas where change is on the horizon, according to Forrester: data governance, application integration and Infrastructure-as-a-service (i.e. cloud computing).
Here are two key observations Forrester culled from its research on upcoming changes in enterprise IT.
Business Intelligence Is the Biggest Changer, but Is IT Taking it Too Lightly?
In a related 2010 Forrester survey, BI was ranked as the third technology that's expected to change the most. This is year BI is number one, with 44 percent of respondents expecting it to change the most and 50 percent expecting it to generate big business value as data mining and reporting tools become more sophisticated and move to a cloud model.
BI is on the minds of IT execs and CIOs more and more as advanced metrics and analysis of raw data are used to improve manufacturing workflow, cut costs and discover new sales opportunities.
In a tight economy, BI allows CIOs to justify business decisions using hard numbers rather than gut feelings, Forrester says. The top BI vendors continue to be Oracle, SAP, IBM and Microsoft and the various BI companies that they all acquire.
Yet there is a contradiction at play in the Forrester survey. Respondents did not indicate plans to change the back-end data warehouse infrastructure that most BI apps depend on.
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