Top 15 Technology Trends Ea Should Watch

October 14, 2010
The Top 15 Technology Trends EA

Should Watch: 2011 To 2013
by Gene Leganza
for Enterprise Architecture Professionals
Making Leaders Successful Every Day

For Enterprise Architecture Professionals
October 14, 2010

The Top 15 Technology Trends EA Should Watch:
2011 To 2013
An Empowered Report: High-Impact Technologies That You Should Track
by Gene Leganza
with Alex Cullen and Mimi An
Execut i v e S u m ma ry
Forrester began summarizing technology trends last year to help enterprise architects create their
organizations’ technology watch lists. For this year’s list of top trends, we’ve used the same criteria —
impact, newness, and complexity — but we’ve modified the categories, merged related topics, added five
new trends, and updated all the entries with this year’s perspective. This year’s categories? “Empowered”
technologies, process-centric data and intelligence, agile and fit-to-purpose applications, and smart
technology management. Also new this year are the results from a survey we ran as input to this report
that asked respondents to rate more than 40 technologies for impact to their organization in the next
three years.
ta ble of Co n te nts N OT E S & R E S O URC E S

2 Technology Evolves Quickly; EAs Should Be Forrester analysts from across teams
On Their Toes collaborated to identify and rank technologies
Formalize Your Technology Watch List To Stay that are new or changing, have the potential for
On Top Of High-Impact Trends significant impact, and require an IT-led strategy
to exploit.
Where Our Survey Respondents Are Placing
Their Bets
Related Research Documents
5 Forrester’s Top 15 Technology Trends For
“Smart Computing Drives The New Era Of IT
Enterprise Architects To Watch
Growth”
Theme No. 1: “Empowered” Technologies December 4, 2009
Theme No. 2: Process-Centric Data And “The Top 15 Technology Trends EA Should Watch”
Intelligence
October 6, 2009
Theme No. 3: Agile And Fit-To-Purpose
Applications
Theme No. 4: Smart Technology Management
recommendations
21 Empowered Organizations Are More Than The
Sum Of Their Empowered Parts
22 Supplemental Material
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2 The Top 15 Technology Trends EA Should Watch: 2011 To 2013
Technology Evolves Quickly; EAs should be on their toes

In the year that has passed since Forrester published its last “top trends” research report, the
technology landscape has continued to change.1 Forrester has seen IT strategy documents with
formal plans for diverse areas ranging from cloud-based deployments, which didn’t exist as an
option five years ago, to strategies for tablet PCs — which didn’t exist as an option before Apple’s
iPad launch in the spring of this year! Those who doubt that the changing technology landscape
can have dramatic business impact need only to check out the real-world examples in Forrester’s
book Empowered; the authors contrast the positive impact of innovative use of social media along
with mobile and cloud technologies against the sometimes dire results of ignoring these same
technologies.2 As for what continues to emerge, public Webinars from vendors this year covered big
data, NoSQL, social media analytics, green IT, security in the cloud — the list goes on and on.
Formalize Your Technology Watch List To Stay On Top Of High-Impact Trends

In last year’s document, Forrester recommended that architects gain control of this runaway train
by keeping track of the trends in a formal watch list that highlights their potential value to IT or the
business. We’ve seen some examples of these watch lists in use, and the most effective approach shows
the value to the enterprise, the potential deployment risk, and the time frame in an easy-to-grasp
graphic (see Figure 1). While architects typically use these new technology road maps as planning
documents, they can also be ideal tools for socializing technology plans and generating dialogue
with business stakeholders — but only if you can connect the technologies to specific business needs
and desired business capabilities. Defining your own custom criteria and filtering Forrester’s list of
technologies can help you focus on the trends that are likely to have high impact in your organization.
Where Our Survey Respondents Are Placing Their Bets

We received 65 responses to the online survey we posted. This survey listed 46 technologies
or technology areas and asked people to rate what they thought would have impact in their
organizations over the next three years. The results? Forty-five of the items on the list got at least one
vote of confidence, but the technologies that respondents expected to have the most impact on their
organizations were mobile technologies, collaboration and social media, business intelligence, and
infrastructure virtualization (see Figure 2).
We found some interesting differences in the technologies of interest for organizations with fewer
than 5,000 employees versus those for organizations with more than 5,000 employees. Technologies
that made the top 10 for expected impact in larger organizations that did not appear on the smaller
organizations’ shortlist were master data management, portfolio management tools, telepresence,
business rules processing, and human-centric business process management (BPM). Technologies
included in the smaller organizations’ top 10 that were not on the larger organizations’ shortlist
were security for wireless and mobile devices, social network and social media analysis, security
technology in general, and customer community platforms.
October 14, 2010 © 2010, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

The Top 15 Technology Trends EA Should Watch: 2011 To 2013 3
Figure 1 Tailor Your Organization’s New Tech Road Map
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© 2010, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited October 14, 2010

Figure 2 Our Survey Respondents Place Their Bets On Mobility, Collaboration, BI, And Virtualization
“How much impact will the follow technology areas have in the next two years?”
Don’t know Little or no impact Some impact Strong impact

Technology or technology area
5% 5%
Mobile devices and/or apps 19% 72%
5%
Collaboration/Web 2.0/social media 11% 22% 63%
Business intelligence 6% 12% 20% 62%
Virtualized servers, storage,
and/or networks 8% 9% 23% 60%
Security related to wireless 8% 12% 26% 54%
and mobile devices
Software-as-a-service 6% 9% 32% 52%
Data quality services 6% 22% 22% 51%
Data integration 8% 15% 26% 51%
5%
Security technology in general 8% 37% 51%
Application portfolio management 11% 17% 22% 51%
and project portfolio management tools
Master data management 12% 17% 22% 49%
5%
Real-time business intelligence 20% 28% 48%
Social network analysis and social 8% 26% 19% 48%
media analytics
Content management 15% 11% 28% 46%
Platform-as-a-service 9% 23% 23% 45%
Data- and content-based security 9% 19% 28% 45%
Business rules processing 12% 14% 31% 43%
Systems management and automation 14% 17% 26% 43%
Customer community platforms 11% 25% 23% 42%
Telepresence or enhanced use of video 8% 22% 29% 42%
communication in general
Network intrusion prevention 11% 17% 31% 42%
Information-as-a-service 11% 20% 31% 39%
Client virtualization 12% 23% 26% 39%
Metadata management/business metadata 12% 26% 23% 38%
Portal software 8% 20% 34% 38%
Base: 65 IT professionals
(percentages may not total 100 because of rounding)
Source: August 2010 Global Technology Trends Online Survey

Forrester’s Top 15 Technology Trends For Enterprise Architects To Watch

While none of the trends we listed last year have faded into obscurity or become so absorbed into
the mainstream that they have lost their “new” feel, this year’s list is fresh because we:
· Revamped the categories. We merged the categories for social, mobile, and cloud technologies
into a single “‘empowered’ technologies” category to align with the use cases in our latest
book. We added a category for “smart technology management” to showcase the trends that
can help IT create order from the technology complexity that continues to unfold. We carried
over our two categories for “process-centric data and intelligence” and “agile and fit-to-purpose
applications” from last year’s list.
· Merged related smaller trends into broader trends reflecting business use cases. We noted
four instances where we could express individual trends as part of a broader trend: Real-time data
quality services is an inextricable part of real-time BI; cloud-based platforms and software-as-a-
service are part of the broad and evolving trend of cloud deployments in general; mobile devices,
networks, and applications are all part of business processes going mobile; and business rules
and policy-based SOA are both part of the trend to externalize rules to make applications — and
enterprises — more flexible and agile.
· Dropped lower-impact trends . . . Following the process we defined last year, we compiled the
list of competing technology trends and scored them according to our criteria (see Figure 3). To
keep the list a manageable size, we sorted them by impact and took only the top 15.
· . . . to make room for new high-impact entries. Five new high-impact trends hit our radar
screen for enterprise impact in the next three years: 1) event-driven patterns demand attention;
2) information-as-a-service (IaaS) finds a broader audience; 3) analytics target text and social
networks; 4) system management enables continued virtualization; and 5) IT embraces planning
and analysis tools to manage the future (see Figure 4).
Figure 3 Criteria Used To Select Technologies
Criteria Definition
Business/IT impact Business Capabilities that will have an impact on operating model and external
relationships compared with what the business is likely to have today
IT Positive or negative impact on major cost areas, or responsiveness or
delivery quality for a major IT function, or IT external relationships
“Newness” Technology area where firms are likely to have little or no knowledge
or experience
Complexity Complexity in terms of areas affected or uncertain strategy

Figure 4 The Top 15 Technology Trends Scored By Criteria
Technology trend Impact “Newness” Complexity

Next-gen BI takes shape, combining real-time access with
pervasiveness, agility, and self-service. Very high High High
Business rules processing and policy-based SOA move to the
mainstream. Very high High High
SaaS and cloud-based platforms become standard. Very high High Very high
System management enables continued virtualization. Very high Moderate Low
Collaboration platforms become people-centric. Very high Moderate High
Event-driven patterns demand attention. High Very high High
Customer community platforms integrate with business apps. High Very high High
Apps and business processes go mobile on powerful devices and High Very high High
faster networks.
Analytics target text and social networks. High Very high High
IaaS finds a broader audience. High Very high Low to high
IT embraces planning and analysis tools to manage the future. High Moderate Moderate
BPM will be Web-2.0-enabled. High Moderate Moderate
Client virtualization is ubiquitous. High Moderate Moderate
Master data management matures. High Moderate Very high
Telepresence gains widespread use. Moderate High Low
New for 2011 to 2013

Theme No. 1: “Empowered” Technologies

Forrester’s book Empowered shows the dramatic impact possible from combining Social Computing,
mobile technologies, collaboration platforms, and cloud-based capabilities for rapid deployment
of innovative new ideas. And anyone who thinks that the big impact is limited to social-network-
based consumer marketing is missing the major benefits coming from enabling innovation by an
increasingly tech-savvy workforce. Think outside the box — and enable the individuals in your
enterprise to do so — by evaluating the key technology trends driving empowered technologies (see
Figure 5).
Figure 5 Key Technology Trends Driving “Empowered” Technologies
5-1 SaaS and cloud-based platforms become standard
If you still think the best answer when Impact

deploying any new application is to buy a
server and rack it in your data center, you are Very high business impact: SaaS-based applications will
woefully behind the times and may just be enable business execs to address application functionality,
making the most expensive and slowest scalability, and deployment needs more rapidly. Even if IT
decision possible. Cloud computing is here to mostly uses IaaS and PaaS options, the business will
stay, with SaaS-based applications continuing benefit from rapid deployment.
as its most prevalent form as concerns such as
security and availability recede. As SaaS’s Very high IT impact: IT execs must triage where they
momentum continues, organizations will need invest their resources as well adopt new application
to expand the range of requirements for which support practices for SaaS, while completely re-evaluating
a SaaS-based solution is appropriate and define capacity issues as well as architecture standards for
new roles for business-side application and applications developed or hosted in the cloud.
vendor management. Virtualized data center
services — both raw computing infrastructure “Newness”
and platforms for application development —
are viable alternatives for some custom High: SaaS options expand as new IaaS and PaaS options
application needs. Initially, organizations will continue to evolve.
use cloud platforms for new application
workloads where rapid deployment and
scalability are required, but savvy IT shops will Complexity
look to cloud options for IT deployment cost Very high: IT-business relationships will change with
optimization and strategic rightsourcing. respect to SaaS, and IaaS and PaaS options require a re-
examination of financial models, risk, and operations
processes.
Further reading:
Forrester’s October 2, 2009, ”TechRadar™ For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals: Cloud Computing,
Q3 2009” report by James Staten, and Forrester’s February 22, 2010, ”SaaS Valuation Criteria” report by Liz
Herbert

Figure 5 Key Technology Trends Driving “Empowered” Technologies (Cont.)
5-2 Collaboration platforms become people-centric
Collaboration platforms will shift from Impact

document-centric to people-centric. People-
centric collaboration platforms will take Very high business impact: Communication and
advantage of Web 2.0 capabilities such as collaboration technologies converge, leading to greater
profiling, tagging, and communities and will organizational responsiveness to business changes.
shift the emphasis from document
collaboration to facilitating the interactions of Moderate IT impact: These technologies are integrated
people in the organization. These collaboration into the vendor products IT uses now.
platforms will surface expertise and interest as
well as availability, fostering the creation of “Newness”
networks that help people be more effective
with their jobs and challenges. One-to-one Medium: Although a minority of firms are exploring these
communications such as email will take a technologies today, Forrester is seeing a substantial ramp
smaller share of individuals’ time as the center in interest, including from “mainstream” industries such as
of collaboration moves to these new platforms. government and financial services.
Meanwhile, social networking in the enterprise
will accelerate collaboration in general as
organizations rush to establish their strategies Complexity
and vendors move aggressively to claim some High: The technologies are somewhat straightforward, but
differentiated space in the Web 2.0 market. the organizational change to gain benefits while
Enterprises will look to attain critical mass maintaining controls is substantial.
using tools with broad appeal, and architects
must move quickly to define requirements and
establish standards before multiple
disconnected solutions take root.
Further reading:
Forrester’s April 22, 2010, “Enterprise Social Networking 2010 Market Overview” report by Rob Koplowitz,
and Forrester’s April 30, 2008, “Social Computing Changes The Enterprise Collaboration Landscape”
report by Rob Koplowitz

5-3 Customer community platforms integrate with business apps
Businesses will integrate external customer Impact

communities with their internal business apps.
Businesses are building or connecting with High business impact: Some firms and functions within
customer communities to gain better insights the firms will take advantage of this and learn how to use
into customer behaviors and to monitor the insights from customer communities to produce better
reactions to business actions. Organizations products and services, heighten market visibility, and
can use customer communities to support lower costs.
market research and product development,
accelerate distribution of marketing messages, Low IT impact: These platforms will be acquired as
provide deeper insights about individuals and standalone products or cloud-based services; information
accounts for sales, and promote customer integration will be their primary impact.
self-service to drive down support costs. These
customer communities are quite separate from
the internal systems businesses use to run their
operations. Over the next three years, Forrester “Newness”
expects a shift from standalone communities
to communities integrated with internal Very high: While many firms are pursuing customer
systems such as customer relationship communities, only the most leading-edge firms have
management systems. thought about how to combine them with their
internal systems.
Complexity
High: The challenge will be to build business consensus

on a strategy and what this integration means for platforms.
Further reading:
Forrester’s January 5, 2010, “Topic Overview: Social CRM Goes Mainstream” report by William Band and
Natalie L. Petouhoff, Ph.D., and Forrester’s upcoming “Zero In On Customer Relationship
Management HEROes — The Role Of Advanced Analytics” report by James Kobielus

5-4 Apps and business processes go mobile on powerful devices and faster networks
As users become more mobile, the applications Impact

they use will become mobile-enabled. Some
packaged apps vendors are providing mobile High business impact: Business processes will be
interfaces that allow people to see pending extended to the mobile workforce, bringing greater
work and complete tasks on their mobile efficiency and compliance.
phone. As for custom development, Moore’s
law, fixed-rate data plans, and dramatically High IT impact: IT must add mobile support to
improved browsers have made developing applications and will be challenged to manage and secure
mobile applications an approachable activity mobile devices and networks.
for mainstream development shops. And
mainstream enterprise IT is interested: Driven “Newness”
by visions of fully mobile, always reachable,
more productive employees, firms are Very high: Mobile-aware business processes are very new,
grappling with the best way to turn mobile with few vendors directly addressing them. Management
development into a core extension of existing of mobile infrastructure and devices is not new, but will
custom development processes. Meanwhile, continue to face new challenges.
Wi-Fi and cellular networks will become
increasingly capable of serving as the user’s
primary network. Mobile devices — Complexity
smartphones, tablets, and netbooks — are High: IT and business managers must decide on which
converging around OS-based camps. Firms will applications to mobile-enable while telecom sourcing will
standardize devices less and focus device need to be revisited and device standards, provisioning,
management and security with a multiplatform and management will need to mature.
strategy. Netbooks and tablets will be more
attractive to support employees who are
primarily mobile.
Further reading:
Forrester’s August 24, 2010, ”Define Your Mobile Development Strategy” report by Jeffrey S. Hammond
and Forrester’s July 14, 2009, “Netbooks Remain Adjunct PCs . . . For Now” report by Paul Jackson

5-5 Telepresence gains widespread use
Telepresence will make videoconferencing Impact

much more accepted in business by providing
high-definition, life-size images and realistic Medium business impact: Businesses will add “virtual
lighting and sound. Telepresence brings meetings” to their current mix of travel and telephone
together globally distributed people in conference calls and even to client networking events.
situations where travel never could have been
justified. Telcos including AT&T, BT, Orange, and Very low IT impact: Organizations will for the most part
Tata have entered the fray and have been joined outsource this capability to telepresence room operators.
by systems integrators including IBM and new- HD videoconferencing, as it becomes more widespread,
generation managed service providers such as will require network infrastructure adjustments.
Glowpoint to provide end-to-end solutions
that range from build-only to hands-free white- “Newness”
glove service. And the improved experience is
steadily moving from the fit-for-purpose High: Although there has been recent buzz about
conference room all the way down to the telepresence, few business leaders are familiar with it.
desktop. Cisco’s acquisition of Tandberg has
triggered a scramble to provide solutions for Complexity
the board room, team room, video unit on
wheels, desktop, and even smartphone. But Low: Because telepresence will be implemented as a
video conferencing won’t really explode until service, there will be little need for investment, and costs
we have true standards and interoperability. will track business adoption.
The path is surveyed with suppliers like Tata
Communications and AT&T providing bridging
services between firms and video conferencing
vendors providing gateways, but the path won’t
be paved until emerging standards efforts gain
critical mass.
Further reading:
Forrester’s April 1, 2010, “How Tech Strategists Can Ride The Coming Tidal Wave Of Business Video” report
by Henry Dewing, and Forrester’s February 25, 2009, “The ROI Of Telepresence” report, by Claire Schooley
Theme No. 2: Process-Centric Data And Intelligence

Use of your business’ information assets is hampered by quality and trust issues, and this use is
largely offline, where analytics are used in batch mode to generate reports that will later guide
management decisions. During the next three years, real-time information on customer behaviors
and market conditions will become more prevalent, allowing frontline operational staff and
applications to detect and respond to opportunities — such as adjusting pricing and product
offers as demand changes — thereby squeezing more pennies of profit out of each customer
touchpoint. Increasingly, understanding unstructured data plays a critical part in daily operations.
Today’s unmanaged information environments and batch-oriented technologies won’t suffice. Key
technologies that you should evaluate in this category range from real-time business analytics and
real-time data quality services to text analytics and social network analysis (see Figure 6).

Figure 6 Key Technology Trends Driving Process-Centric Data And Intelligence
6-1 Next-gen BI takes shape combining real-time access with pervasiveness, agility, and self-service
The information economy is here, and BI is Impact

hotter than ever. Firms compete based on
insights from analytics, and next-gen BI will Very high business impact: Firms will increase their use
pave the way for a significant increase in BI’s of analytics to improve their speed of response to
impact on the enterprise. The shift from changing market conditions.
historical to real-time analytics will require that
related processes such as data quality services High IT impact: IT needs to enable successful end user BI
also move to real time. Additionally, six key self-service to keep runaway BI costs in check.
trends will characterize next-gen BI: 1)
automation to keep the many independent “Newness”
components, including automated discovery,
in sync; 2) pervasiveness, integrating BI with High: Although traditional BI has been around for many
processes, apps, and the Information years, operational BI, end user self-service, and free-form
Workplace; 3) unification — of batch and exploration are still leading-edge technologies.
real-time, historical and predictive, disk and
in-memory, data and content; 4) “no borders,”
providing model-less exploration and analysis Complexity
and on-demand “post-discovery” analysis; 5) High: The complexity challenge will not be around the
agility, moving BI architecture toward technologies per se but rather in the continued effort of
integrated metadata and alternatives for the gaining business consensus on data governance so that
DW/DBMS and exploration technologies; and 6) bad data is not driving strategic and operational
self-service for both casual and power users, decisions.
which will in turn drive both pervasiveness and
agility.
Further reading:
Forrester’s April 22, 2010, “Agile BI Out Of The Box ” report by Boris Evelson, and Forrester’s October 23,
2009, “Trends In Data Quality” report by Rob Karel

Figure 6 Key Technology Trends Driving Process-Centric Data And Intelligence (Cont.)
6-2 Analytics target text and social networks
Enterprises have lots of unstructured content in Impact

internal apps such as email and call center
notes, and there is a rapidly growing amount of High business impact: These new technologies bring
text that enterprises care about in social media powerful analytics to bear on rich areas as yet untapped
such as Twitter and other social forums. To make for intelligence about customers and products.
sense of this cacophony, business leaders are
pioneering text analytics tools. This technology Medium IT impact: They will provide a challenge for
has a compelling value proposition: extracting information architects and tax the semantic capabilities of
meaning out of large quantities of text by existing investments.
mining, interpreting, and structuring
information to reveal hidden patterns and “Newness”
relationships. When text analytics tools are
incorporated with other systems such as Very high: Until recently, text analytics software was
enterprise content management (ECM) or obscure and academic, used primarily by early adopters in
business intelligence (BI), they are especially the life sciences field. Social network analysis is also
powerful, because instead of just reporting or just emerging.
visualizing these patterns or trends, the
integrated systems can act on the information.
Enterprises are also turning to analytics for social Complexity
networks to mine for expertise and influence High: Exploiting these technologies will require the kind
among customers, employees, and other key of IT-business collaboration needed for areas like BI and
stakeholders. Social network analysis involves MDM.
discovering, mapping, and visualizing
relationships among people, groups,
companies, and the entities with which they
interact. This will be a key technology as social
media continues to grow in influence.
Further reading:
Forrester’s October 22, 2009, “Text Analytics Takes Business Insight To New Depths” report by Leslie
Owens, and Forrester’s upcoming “Zero In On CRM HEROes By Using Social Network Analysis To
Mine Influence” report by James Kobielus

6-3 IaaS finds a broader audience
Organizations continue to show strong interest Impact

in IaaS to help them with the increasing data
integration challenges they face. IaaS offers a High business impact: IaaS provides agility and flexibility
virtualized data services layer that integrates for enabling high-impact areas such as MDM and BI.
heterogeneous mashups of data and content
to service any application in real time or batch. High IT impact: IaaS can significantly alter IT’s approach
IaaS provides a flexible data integration to its data management strategy.
platform based on a newer generation of
service-oriented standards that enables “Newness”
ubiquitous access to any type of data, on any
platform, using a wide range of interface and Very high: IaaS presents an approach to data integration
data access standards. In addition, IaaS goes that is significantly different from the traditional EII, ETL,
beyond data integration: It can support and replication approaches.
multiple requirements, including “single
version of the truth,” real-time business
intelligence (BI), enterprisewide search, high- Complexity
performance transactional applications, Low to high: The complexity depends on the scope of the
federated views across multiple lines of deployment. Small projects focusing on two to three data
business (LOBs), and improved security for sources can leverage IaaS with minimal effort, but larger,
access to sensitive data. Originally used in more-complex, enterprisewide data integration projects
limited scenarios focusing on real-time data integrating hundreds of sources or requiring additional
access, IaaS is finding new audiences by data quality and data governance initiatives will add to
focusing beyond read-only use cases, satisfying the complexity.
an increasing need for agility and automation
with quicker ROI for data-driven initiatives, and
leveraging existing technology to the extent
possible. Forrester is also seeing increased
interest in integrating semistructured and
unstructured data with IaaS.
Further reading:
Forrester’s February 10, 2010, “The Forrester Wave™: Information-As-A-Service, Q1 2010” report by Noel
Yuhanna and Mike Gilpin

6-4 Master data management matures
Master data management (MDM) will continue Impact

to become more mature and effective. MDM is
a business capability leveraging multiple High business impact: MDM will enable operational
enabling technologies. The key business issue improvements as well as improved business intelligence
is having a standardized, trusted source of data and compliance.
across function and application silos. Today,
MDM is immature even with significant High IT impact: MDM’s IT impact will be high due to the
spending in this area, mostly due to a lack of complexity of MDM tools as well as MDM’s span of
business involvement that leads to business integration, need for an information architecture, and
stakeholders not embracing IT-driven radically improved data governance.
requirements. Key issues in this space include:
how to move from managing multiple siloed “Newness”
master domains such as customer or product to
supporting a data model, MDM solution, and Medium: Technologies are becoming embedded in major
architecture that can actively support the vendor offerings, but IT must still ramp up on effective
relationships between these domains; how to application.
select the optimal MDM architecture (e.g., hub,
federated, SOA/IaaS, analytical, registry,
index — or, more realistically, a hybrid Complexity
approach); and how to support business Very high: This technology requires an information
partners in driving and enabling the necessary architecture synchronized with data governance and
data governance infrastructure, including quality.
setting up the necessary organizational roles,
responsibilities, and accountabilities as well as
the policies and processes that will be
necessary to ensure that the MDM strategy
can succeed.
Further reading:
Forrester’s October 23, 2009, “Trends 2009: Master Data Management” report by Rob Karel, and
Forrester’s February 4, 2010 “Forrester TechRadar™: Enterprise Data Integration, Q1 2010” report by Noel
Yuhanna and Rob Karel
Theme No. 3: Agile And Fit-To-Purpose Applications

Along with IT’s service infrastructure, the structure of business applications is a major impediment
to IT responsiveness. There are a number of technologies that will improve application flexibility, and
while some are not new, what is new is how they are evolving to become easier to leverage and use. The
three technologies described in Figure 7 will have the largest impact on applications’ ability to change
(see Figure 7). Make sure your application strategies are lined up to take advantage of them.

Figure 7 Key Technology Trends Driving Agile And Fit-To-Purpose Applications
7-1 Business rules processing and policy-based SOA move to the mainstream
A key trend in application architectures is the Impact

externalization of the policies and rules that
drive key decision points in application logic. Very high business impact: Business rules processing
Externalization exposes rules to policy automates highly conditional transactions that staff
subject-matter experts for explicit members perform manually.
development and maintenance. Business rules
processing enables rule management by Very high IT impact: Both business rules and policy-
business-side experts, while policy-based SOA based SOA will be important for applications that are
enables application developers to better “built for change.”
manage SOA services to conform to policy and
rules. Applications based on business rules “Newness”
processing are moving from niche into
mainstream as rules enable the creation of High: Rules processing technology will affect app design
more-responsive, more-personalized practices and the division of responsibility for application
experiences based on more-complex change between business and IT. Policy-based SOA
conditions. Rules engines with the appropriate. architecture will be very new to most environments.
configuration management infrastructure
enable business managers to maintain rules
and more quickly explore ways of optimizing Complexity
business processes. Policy-based SOA High: Business and IT will need to redesign the
externalizes decisions about the business, responsibilities for application functionality design and
operational, and design characteristics of an support.
SOA service to reduce the cost of development
and maintenance and achieve better visibility
into policies. Forrester expects a long digestion
period for policy-based SOA.
Further reading:
Forrester’s October 3, 2008, “Best Practices In Implementing Business Rules” report by Mike Gualtieri and
John R. Rymer, and Forrester’s August 26, 2008, “How To Get Started On SOA Policy Management” report
by Randy Heffner

Figure 7 Key Technology Trends Driving Agile And Fit-To-Purpose Applications (Cont.)
7-2 BPM will be Web-2.0-enabled
Business process management (BPM) will gain Impact

new value as it becomes Web-2.0-enabled and
continues to adapt to trends such as dynamic High business impact: Process mashups allow business
case management and event processing. BPM leaders to automate processes that previously they couldn’t
is a hot technology within business due to its justify. Process wikis will have a lower impact but
focus on efficiency. BPM-oriented standards will bring operational savings through process
such as BPEL, BPMN, and BPEL for People lower improvement.
adoption barriers because they improve
business working with IT implementation. Web High IT impact: IT staff members will have to undergo
2.0 technologies such as wikis for process training to learn model-driven development, and
documentation will enable frontline business organizations will have to integrate business staff members
managers to update knowledge about the into system design and configuration. Lower barriers to
processes they work with. Web 2.0 “process business involvement may reduce the need for low-cost
mashups” will empower savvy users to create offshore resources for application development and
quick end user interfaces to extend current support.
BPM implementations and build “lightweight
BPM” for processes that IT isn’t engaged in “Newness”
supporting. While vertical-specific case
management tools exist for such areas as social Medium: BPM technologies are well established. BPM
services and law enforcement, Forrester standards are also established, but few IT shops are
expects BPM tools to be the primary familiar with them. Web 2.0 extensions are very new.
technology for generally applicable case
management functionality until dynamic case
management tools emerge as their own Complexity
market in the 2013 time frame. Medium: Organizations will have to review their policies
and standards.
Further reading:
Forrester’s August 24, 2010, “The Forrester Wave™: Business Process Management Suites, Q3 2010” report
by Clay Richardson, and Forrester’s December 28, 2009, “Dynamic Case Management — An Old Idea
Catches New Fire” report by Connie Moore and Craig Le Clair

Figure 7 Key Technology Trends Driving Agile And Fit-To-Purpose Applications (Cont.)
7-3 Event-driven patterns demand attention
Forrester has been publishing research on the Impact

X-Internet — what is currently being referred to
as ”the Internet of things” — since 2001: Smart High business impact: Event processing has the potential
devices phone home or are polled for data for significant business impact; complexity and IT’s lack of
about location, status, instrument readings, or experience in this area will somewhat limit progress.
anything that can be digitized. The resulting
data deluge has helped drive interest in High IT impact: Architects and developers will need to
systems for situational awareness and for understand when to handle events with custom code,
taking actions based on patterns of events. business rules, or CEP platforms and adapt event
Access to information from smart devices as processing mindsets to their SOA environments.
well as from traditional sources of data such as
transactional financial applications — but in “Newness”
real time — has triggered a rising tide of
interest in event processing systems for a Very high: While this area has been hovering as an area of
variety of uses such as fraud detection, interest for several years, it is only beginning to affect
logistics, and law enforcement. Other trends mainstream organizations.
that are feeding the real-time frenzy, such as
social-media-based customer service (and the
text analytics needed to analyze social media Complexity
information), contribute to interest in event- High: For most organizations, both the business scenarios
processing architectures that take rule and the IT solutions will require considerable analysis.
processing to new heights. While business rules
can act on a single payload of data, event-
based platforms can operate on multiple
payloads from different sources and respond
with low latency, providing unprecedented
capabilities for responding in real time to
complex patterns of events. As awareness of
and responding to events in real time become
increasingly typical business scenarios that IT
must handle, architects and developers will
have to take a hard look at the impact to their
application architecture road maps.
Further reading:
Forrester’s August 4, 2009, “The Forrester Wave™: Complex Event Processing (CEP) Platforms, Q3 2009”
report by Mike Gualtieri and John R. Rymer, and Forrester’s January 21, 2009, ”Must You Choose Between
Business Rules And Complex Event Processing Platforms?” report by Charles Brett and Mike Gualtieri

Theme No. 4: Smart Technology Management

The time for the cobbler’s children to remain shoeless is over. Virtualized infrastructure resources
are now the rule rather than the exception, and facing pressure to deliver cloud-like ease-of-
deployment internally, many architects will place system management automation tools high their
list of must-have, high-impact technologies. Additionally, now that many EA teams are regularly
engaging the business with business architecture efforts, EAs need a repository for planning
artifacts to enable the advanced analysis that will help them understand exactly where business
impact is going to come from. It’s high time IT tooled up, looking in particular at smart technology
management technologies (see Figure 8).
Figure 8 Key Technology Trends Driving Smart Technology Management
8-1 System management enables continued virtualization
Virtualized infrastructure resources have Impact

quickly become the norm as organizations
squeeze waste out of the IT budget. More apps Medium business impact: As IT’s management
sharing fewer servers (as well as other capabilities improve, businesses will see the same or
infrastructure resources) means better improved service levels.
management is necessary to maintain service
levels. And as savvy IT shops look to provide Very high IT impact: IT must acquire and deploy
cloud-like ease of procurement of new comprehensive management tools, obtain training, and
resources and pay-as-you-use chargeback gain some experience in these tools before coming
scenarios, the bar for system management anywhere near mastery. Utilization of vendors’ service
automation is being raised rapidly. Over the offerings will spike.
next three years, we will see the average
shop’s management tool set expand and “Newness”
expertise levels rise to meet these
challenges. Medium: System management and automated operations
have been around as long as data centers have, but
virtualization and potentially complex resource scheduling
present new wrinkles.
Complexity
Low: While some understanding of business workload
requirements is necessary, most infrastructure and
operations environments already have a handle on these;
this is really a matter of I&O gearing up.
Further reading:
Forrester’s December 9, 2009, “Put DCIM Into Your Automation Plans” report by Galen Schreck, and
Forrester’s July 22, 2010, “The Future Of Configuration Management” report by Galen Schreck

Figure 8 Key Technology Trends Driving Smart Technology Management (Cont.)
8-2 IT embraces planning and analysis tools to manage the future
For several years, vendors have offered various Impact

planning and analysis tools targeting such
areas as application portfolio management Medium business impact: Planning tools will help
(APM), project portfolio management (PPM), convert input from business architects and analysts into
and configuration management, while execution strategies that will boost the right business
enterprise architecture tool suite vendors have capabilities at the right times.
added increasingly comprehensive repository
and analysis capabilities to their offerings. Still, High IT impact: With detailed business information now
past surveys examining tool usage available to finally enable the kind of business-driven
consistently show the most-used tool for many architecture planning EA pundits have talked about for
of these functions to be Microsoft Office. But IT years, analysis and planning tools will be able to laser-
is becoming more process-driven, and IT’s focus IT resources where they will matter the most.
adoption of ITIL, service management, and
project management best practices is driving “Newness”
adoption of CMDB and PPM tools. EA tool
vendors have turned from piling on modeling Medium: Planning tools are not new, but vendors are
functionality to providing analysis capabilities listening to IT customers and have turned from continually
to drive IT planning. Meanwhile, as business adding modeling functionality to adding analysis
architecture programs gain traction, architects functions that directly address planners’ and architects’
and business staff are using techniques such as needs in significantly improved ways, with heat maps and
capability mapping to link business goals and the promise of road mapping capabilities on the horizon.
activities to their enabling IT components. With
this detailed insight into business needs, the
potential for analysis tools to correlate and Complexity
analyze such items as IT spend, skilled technical Medium: To be effective, the tools require an increase in
resources, risk exposures, and business the kind of business/IT collaboration that has marked
priorities will elevate this nice-to-have area of incipient business architecture efforts.
technology to a must-have. In a trend Forrester
calls the ”industrialization of IT,” the increasingly
process-driven IT organization will employ
tools to manage portfolios of assets, services,
applications, and projects, while using the
latest generation of EA tools to analyze needs
and options and plan the road ahead.
Further reading:
Forrester’s January 7, 2009, “The Forrester Wave™: Business Process Analysis, EA Tools, And IT Planning,
Q1 2009” report by Henry Peyret, and Forrester’s June 23, 2009, “Anatomy Of A Portfolio Management
Tool” report by Phil Murphy

Figure 8 Key Technology Trends Driving Smart Technology Management (Cont.)
8-3 Client virtualization is ubiquitous
Client virtualization will continue to expand as Impact

an architecture for supporting user application
workspaces. Enterprises are slowly moving Low business impact: Ubiquitous client virtualization’s
from a “two-sizes-fit-all” scenario to a ”many- primary impacts are increased security, increased
sizes-fit-one” scenario in which the corporate employee productivity, and availability of applications
desktop is not a specific machine. Typical from any and all devices, including those the firm does not
implementation plans target 2012, and drivers own.
include lowering costs and improving
manageability and security. Client virtualization High IT impact: This will change desktop support
has the ability to simplify the cost of managing practices and workloads.
and supporting end user environments while at
the same time offering the ability to support a “Newness”
wider variety of end user devices, from user-
provisioned laptops to netbooks and high-end Medium: Client virtualization technology is available
smartphones such as iPhones. Client today, with the largest change being how widespread IT
virtualization, encompassing desktop and decides to utilize it.
application virtualization technologies, provides
a solution for improving desktop and application
availability both online and offline. Client Complexity
virtualization can be used to improve application Medium: Client virtualization as a core strategy requires
and data security by keeping applications and rethinking everything from end user device support to
data within a data center instead of distributing user segmentation to tiered service levels.
them to the end user device.
Further reading:
Forrester’s January 25, 2010, “Predictions 2010: Client Virtualization” report by Benjamin Gray
Re c o m m e n dat i o n s
Empowered Organizations Are More Than The Sum Of Their Empowered Parts
Forrester’s book Empowered presents the benefits of enabling “HEROes” — that is, individual
“highly empowered and resourceful operatives” — but Forrester’s authors don’t present a future
characterized by over-the-top Technology Populism accompanied by a complete loss of central
coordination and planning.3 On the contrary, they paint a picture that will look quite familiar to
savvy enterprise architects. The empowering IT organization enables innovation by maintaining a
knowledge base of technologies that can have an impact on the business and by implementing a
process for refreshing that knowledge base. It looks for base technologies that can support a broad
array of business benefits and executes processes for cross-silo collaboration. These activities will
map directly to the EA team in many organizations. What’s missing for some EA teams that are
struggling to keep up with developing strategic artifacts while continuing to contribute to tactical
projects is the development of regular processes to assess emerging technology and support
innovation. Architects can enable a consistent stream of business value by:

· Engaging the extended virtual architecture team. With the exception of those in
organizations that maintain large central EA teams, architects must make use of subject-matter
experts (SMEs) wherever they find them. Cultivate an extended network of technology-savvy
practitioners, and encourage wiki-style contributions to emerging technology knowledge
bases. Execute processes for the regular vetting and analysis of this material.
· Establishing forums for collaborative business-IT brainstorming. EA’s recent forays
into business architecture have set the stage for more-active collaboration between IT
and the business, providing architects with a much better opportunity to understand the
business operating model and important business issues. Move these exchanges from
data collection exercises to dynamic discussions of opportunities for technology-enabled
innovation. Establish formal processes for vetting ideas and shepherding new ideas through
risk and opportunity assessment analyses and potentially forward to become pilots and
implementation projects.4
· Understanding the business impact of policies, standards, and guidelines. Many
architects have already learned the hard way that knee-jerk naysaying limits EA’s influence.
While standards are important and can in fact be critical to maintaining an organization’s
agility, most organizations don’t need one-size-fits-all standardization but rather a
thoughtful understanding of when to restrict behavior and when flexibility can be beneficial.
To standardize or not to standardize is a business decision — go beyond the standard advice
of simply trying to speak about architecture in business terms: Think business thoughts
about opportunity, risk, and risk mitigation.
Supplemental MATERIAL
Methodology
Forrester fielded its August 2010 Global Technology Trends Online Survey to 65 IT professionals by
posting the survey on our site and circulating it via Twitter. Forrester fielded the survey in August
2010 and did not provide incentives to respondents.

Analysts Interviewed For This Document
William Band Diego Lo Giudice

Ellen Daley Phil Murphy
Henry Dewing Eveline Oehrlich
Boris Evelson Leslie Owens
Richard Fichera Jonathan Penn
Benjamin Gray Henry Peyret
Mike Gualtieri Clay Richardson
Jeffrey S. Hammond John R. Rymer
Randy Heffner Ted Schadler
Liz Herbert Claire Schooley
Andrew Jaquith James Staten
Rob Karel Ken Vollmer
James G. Kobielus Doug Washburn
Rob Koplowitz Noel Yuhanna
Craig Le Clair
Endnotes
1
In 2009, Forrester began an annual series to supply input to this process by providing a technology scan of
the most likely technologies to have an impact on business and IT organizations over the next three years.
See the October 6, 2009, “The Top 15 Technology Trends EA Should Watch” report.
2
Source: Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler, Empowered: Unleash your Employees, Energize your Customers,
Transform your Business, Harvard Business Review Press, 2010 (http://www.forrester.com/empowered).
3
Thanks to an advancing technology-native workforce, ubiquitous broadband, and abundant collaboration
and Social Computing tools, information workers can now provision their own software tools, information
sources, and social networks via the Web to support their jobs. Individual people, not IT organizations,
are fueling the next wave of IT adoption we’re calling Technology Populism. See the February 22, 2008,
“Embrace The Risks And Rewards Of Technology Populism” report.
4
Business leaders expect technology to help drive competitive differentiation, yet only a small number of
IT organizations have established a formal approach to innovation with clear roles, responsibilities, and
accountabilities. Even fewer are relying on their EA teams to lead innovation efforts, though architects are
uniquely qualified for the role. With a small change in focus and a collaborative approach, architects have
an opportunity to become their organization’s driving force for IT innovation. See the November 4, 2008,
“Establish Enterprise Architects As IT Innovation Champions” report.

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is an independent research company
that provides pragmatic and forward-
thinking advice to global leaders in
business and technology. Forrester
works with professionals in 19 key roles
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October 14, 2010

The Top 15 Technology Trends EA

Making Leaders Successful Every Day

October 14, 2010

ta ble of Co n te nts N OT E S & R E S O URC E S

Technology Evolves Quickly; EAs should be on their toes

Formalize Your Technology Watch List To Stay On Top Of High-Impact Trends

Where Our Survey Respondents Are Placing Their Bets

October 14, 2010 © 2010, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

Figure 1 Tailor Your Organization’s New Tech Road Map

Very high value

System management APM

56871 Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

© 2010, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited October 14, 2010

Don’t know Little or no impact Some impact Strong impact

October 14, 2010 © 2010, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

Forrester’s Top 15 Technology Trends For Enterprise Architects To Watch

Figure 3 Criteria Used To Select Technologies

56871 Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

© 2010, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited October 14, 2010

Figure 4 The Top 15 Technology Trends Scored By Criteria

Technology trend Impact “Newness” Complexity

System management enables continued virtualization. Very high Moderate Low

Collaboration platforms become people-centric. Very high Moderate High

Event-driven patterns demand attention. High Very high High

IaaS finds a broader audience. High Very high Low to high

BPM will be Web-2.0-enabled. High Moderate Moderate

Client virtualization is ubiquitous. High Moderate Moderate

Master data management matures. High Moderate Very high

Telepresence gains widespread use. Moderate High Low

New for 2011 to 2013

56871 Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

October 14, 2010 © 2010, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

Theme No. 1: “Empowered” Technologies

Figure 5 Key Technology Trends Driving “Empowered” Technologies

5-1 SaaS and cloud-based platforms become standard

If you still think the best answer when Impact

56871 Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

© 2010, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited October 14, 2010

Figure 5 Key Technology Trends Driving “Empowered” Technologies (Cont.)

5-2 Collaboration platforms become people-centric

Collaboration platforms will shift from Impact

56871 Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

October 14, 2010 © 2010, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

Figure 5 Key Technology Trends Driving “Empowered” Technologies (Cont.)

5-3 Customer community platforms integrate with business apps

Businesses will integrate external customer Impact

High: The challenge will be to build business consensus

56871 Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

© 2010, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited October 14, 2010

Figure 5 Key Technology Trends Driving “Empowered” Technologies (Cont.)

As users become more mobile, the applications Impact

56871 Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

October 14, 2010 © 2010, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited

Figure 5 Key Technology Trends Driving “Empowered” Technologies (Cont.)

5-5 Telepresence gains widespread use

Telepresence will make videoconferencing Impact

56871 Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

Theme No. 2: Process-Centric Data And Intelligence

© 2010, Forrester Research, Inc. Reproduction Prohibited October 14, 2010

Figure 6 Key Technology Trends Driving Process-Centric Data And Intelligence

The information economy is here, and BI is Impact

56871 Source: Forrester Research, Inc.