Mobile collaboration and process-centric data & business intelligence are among Forrester's top technology trends. Gene Leganza, Principal Analyst at Forrester, spoke last month about the top 15 technology trends that Enterprise Architecture (EA) professionals should watch for in next three years (2011-2013). This report is based on the results from Global Technology Trends Online Survey Forrester group conducted last year that asked respondents to rate more than 40 technologies for impact to their organizations in the next three years. The criteria Forrester used for identifying these technologies includes factors like business impact, IT impact, "Newness" (technology areas where firms are likely to have little or no knowledge or experience) and complexity. Gene discussed in the presentation about the four main themes in technology trends.
- Empowered Technologies
- Process-Centric Data and Intelligence
- Agile and Fit-To-Purpose Applications
- Smart Technology Management
In the Empowered Technologies category, he said the Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud-based platforms will become standard and customer community platforms will integrate with business applications. Applications and business processes will go mobile on powerful devices and faster networks. Telepresence will gain widespread use and collaboration platforms will shift from being document-centric to be people-centric. These collaboration platforms will take advantage of Web 2.0 capabilities such as profiling, tagging, and communities.
Process-centric data and intelligence theme includes the next-generation business intelligence (BI) taking shape and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) finding a broader audience. Organizations are using IaaS technology for emulating data warehouses as well as virtualizing federated data sources. Other technologies like Master Data Management (MDM) will mature to provide right information at the right time based on the business context. Also, the analytics space will target text and social networks. Business leaders are pioneering text analytics tools to make sense of the unstructured content in internal applications such as email and call center notes as well as the growing amount of text that enterprises care about in social media such as Twitter and other social forums. Enterprises are also turning to analytics for social networks for data mining purposes which involves discovering, mapping, and visualizing the relationships among people, groups, companies, and the entities with which those organizations interact.
The third theme he discussed, Agile and Fit-To-Purpose Applications, includes trends like business rules processing moving to mainstream and business process management (BPM) being Web 2.0 enabled. There will also be more attention for event-driven patterns. Access to information from smart devices as well as traditional data sources such as transactional financial applications - in real time - has triggered the interest in event processing systems for use cases such as fraud detection, logistics, and law enforcement. Other trends such as social-media based customer service and the text analytics needed to analyze social media information contribute to increasing interest in event processing architectures.
The last theme in the survey is Smart Technology Management where systems management will enable continued virtualization to provide Cloud-like access to the information and client virtualization will become ubiquitous. IT will embrace planning and analytics tools to correlate and analyze such items as IT spend, skilled technical resources, risk exposures and business priorities.
Gene concluded the presentation with a discussion on the scenarios that combine two or more of these technologies which will have the biggest impact. For example, SaaS and cloud-based platforms, business rules processing and policy-based SOA will have a higher impact from both business and IT areas.