What Technology Trends Will Impact Your Organization In The Next 3 Years?

Despite the lack of a sustained full-on recovery in the global economy, one gets the feeling that we’re at the beginning of a period of tech expansion and growth, doesn’t one? For many, 2011 budgeting planning is happening now, so it remains to be seen what your expansion and growth will be in the near term, but there’s certainly no shortage of interesting new developments from technology vendors to whet your appetite.

While it’s fun to look at emerging tech and imagine what impact it might have several years from now, it’s a bit more pragmatic to focus on the technology trends that will be hitting the mainstream and making significant waves in the corporate world and in the public sector in the next few years. 

In Q4 of last year Forrester published The Top 15 Technology Trends EA Should Watch. The author, analyst Alex Cullen, spoke to a few dozen analysts for input and then applied strict criteria for inclusion of a particular tech trend in the doc: 1) significant business or IT impact in the next 3 years; 2) newness, with implications not only for new business capabilities but also the organization’s understanding of the technology and how to manage it; and 3) complexity, especially regarding cross-functional impact to the organization.

I’m working on this year’s trends publication and I’m using the same criteria. I’m getting great input from our analyst community — ours can be a highly collaborative environment — and I’d love to also include some social-media-derived input. Rather than turning to our usual source for EA surveys — a diverse and carefully maintained panel of several hundred clients and non-clients who have opted in to our survey process —  I’m looking solely to Twitter and blog readers for survey participation.

The survey asks you to peruse a list of 40-odd technologies and rate from 1 to 4 the degree to which you think they will impact your organization over the next 3 years. Note that it does not ask you to vote for your favorite technologies, or those that you wish your organizaion would adopt, or those that you think the rest of the world will adopt. I’d like a view into what is likely to happen in your environment — the organization you know the most about.

I’ll publish the results in this blog, so you’ll be able to see what your peers think they’ll be adopting, regardless of what we pundits-for-hire are saying this week. There is room in the survey for a write-in, in case you think I’ve missed something. So have at it! Click on this linkto take the quickie survey, and let us all know what technology trends are likely to impact your organization from 2011 to 2013.

Thanks!

by Gene Leganza