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I’ve already reviewed Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2017. I will now review Forrester’s.

I must admit that it feels like these two organizations work very closely together or that the trends they describe are just too obvious. Gartner’s predictions were predictable; Forrester’s are repetitive. In all fairness, the same trends are predicted by Deloitte, Accenture, McKinsey and just about everyone else who looks at macro technology trends. I guess there are no secrets.

Forrester focuses on three clusters: customer empowerment, CIOs and emerging technologies.

Customer Empowerment Causes & Effects

In the area of customer empowerment, Forrester believes that “empowered customers will accelerate change.” It also believes that “insatiable customers will spur firm-wide organizations.” The conclusion we should reach is that companies respond to customer requirements, desires and experiences. Conversely, companies that fail to respond to customer requirements, desires and experiences will be at a competitive disadvantage to the companies that do respond to customer requirements, desires and experiences. Velocity is the energy here: companies should respond as quickly as possible to customer requirements, desires and experiences. The changes that companies should make include changes to their products and services and the means – through organizational changes – to actually implement the changes. All in all, we’re talking about defining, managing and optimizing the customer journey, something we’ve been talking about for decades.

Forrester also suggests “executive leadership turnover will accelerate” in 2017. I guess the point here is that executives need new skills and competencies necessary to respond to customer requirements, desires and experiences, and those without the skills and competencies have to go. CMOs are also expected to leave. Forrester predicts that 30% (or more) business executives with P&L responsibility and CMOs will leave their organizations in 2017. The problem with these sorts of predictions is that they’re impossible to make. There are so many variables – like the state of the economy, economic policy, age, location, industry and global market conditions – just to name a few, that determine workflow ebbs and flows. 30% is unverifiable – except in 2018 when the data actually comes in (assuming it’s available and accurate).

CIOs Get Smart(er)

Forrester also predicts that CIOs will change their behavior – again (but in the same way) in 2017. CIOs, Forrester predicts, will accelerate the pace of change by changing their organizations, by reallocating their budgets, casting their recruiting nets wider and by developing comprehensive business technology strategies that include all members of their teams: they will “correct bimodal missteps.” Finally, they will double down on Agile and DevOps in an attempt to deliver business-oriented solutions faster. All of this means that CIOs will have to continue their efforts to avoid extinction. Presumably, since they’re a year older now, they’re going to have to move a little faster. Since budgets always get reallocated, the advice to CIOs is to spend more money helping customers spend more money on their company’s products and services. Since skills like cyber security are hard to find, they will have to look harder. New skills around data science, blockchain and AI will be required and since everyone’s looking for the same skills they will obviously be harder – and more expensive – to find.

I’m having a hard time understanding why these CIO predictions are much different from the predictions we made five years ago.

Emerging Technologies

Forrester imagines that there are suites of technologies in which companies will be interested in 2017. The analysts there also opine that companies will adopt technologies faster than they did in the 20th century. We already know that traditional requirements-driven, phased technology adoption has been replaced with near-immediate piloting and adoption. This has been happening for at least five years when “crossing the chasm” and Roger’s 1962 technology adoption bell curve disappeared from the emerging technology world. There are no “laggards” anymore. Everyone who wants to compete is an “early adopter.”  Some are “immediate adopters.”

Forrester predicts that the role of cloud delivery will increase. One interesting prediction here is that some of the companies that combine their operational and strategic technologies in the cloud may become cloud providers to themselves by developing their own cloud hosting and delivery capabilities. While interesting, I suspect that companies will avoid re-investing in their own data centers and leave the cloud to others to manage. Private clouds may emerge and container technology will absolutely become part of prudent cloud architectures.

I agree with Forrester about the increasing role that open source solutions will play going forward. OpenStack may well become a de facto standard versus CloudStack and the other tools offered by the major cloud vendors. I am less interested in the toolsets than I am in the pervasiveness of cloud delivery.

IOT is likely ahead of its time. I agree with Forrester that 2017 will begin the first phase of non-industrial IOT pilots. But in order for B2C IOT to accelerate a lot of other things have to become true, like integrated networks, sensor standards and security protocols.

Like Gartner, Forrester is bullish on augmented reality. As I previously discussed, Augmented reality (AR) will absolutely impact retail transactions. Retail is likely one of the first domains that will be impacted by AR. Education/training is another. AR will enable retail, education and training well before 2020. As the platforms grow, the number of applications will grow. So instead of paying attention to the end game – specific domain applications – watch the content and delivery platform space. Look at the prototypes and use cases: they’re everywhere. AR is effective and when a technology “works” it moves – fast.

The same is true of artificial intelligence (AI). The key, however, is just how embedded AI has already become. The emphasis should not be on creating new, smart applications for most companies (unless you’re an AI company), but to track the growing intelligence embedded in the applications available to enable their business processes and models, as well as whole new applications that were developed from the outset to be “smart” in your industry.  The smartest applications will be upgrades.

So let’s step back. I’ve reviewed three professional assessments of where digital is going in 2017 and beyond. While we can all stipulate that at the end of the day much of this analysis is actually a guess, we can identify the broad strokes that will define at least the trajectories of the major classes of technologies likely to impact business processes and models in the next few years. We can also describe what the organizations that implement the technologies will look like as well as what the leaders of these organizations will do.

The mystery is only around specificity, not generalities. Anyone can describe generalities. In fact, there’s quite a bit of convergence around the general trends we can expect – which is why there’s so much duplication and repetition within the Gartner and Forrester predictions. In fact, I could look at what McKinsey, Deloitte, Accenture and others all think is happening and find more agreement than disagreement. But when we turn to specifics, its gets murkier, especially when we try to predict exactly when certain technologies will be widely deployed or the impact deployment will have. No one can do that – not even well paid professional technology trends analysts.