Technology
& Innovation
North America

Leaders are sitting at the edge of a transition from the leaders-as-heroes that got our organizations through the tough times of the pandemic — where confidence in executive leadership nearly doubled between 2019 and 2021 — to now, where many leaders are left unsure what their role in leading their team to high performance should be. Is their job to call people back to the old habits of in-office work supported by reactive leadership with a goal of incremental growth? Or is it to embrace the ongoing dynamism of whatever turbulence comes next and learn to steer a creative and innovative team to bold, new outcomes? In this session, clients will learn:

• The role that they have as leaders in setting the stabilizing vision of their teams.
• How leaders can increase the energy of the “local culture” that their team experiences.
• The role that technology — including expanding AI tools — will play in making them “better, stronger, faster” as leaders.

Speakers:
James L. McQuivey, PhD, VP, Research Director, Forrester

The ideal state for the modern enterprise is direct alignment between the technology stack and the business strategy. Achieving that state is difficult to do, however. Most enterprise tech stacks are a jumbled mix of legacy and modern technology. These companies acquire new technologies without identifying business value.

This session will focus on:

• How enterprises can achieve a tech stack that minimizes technical debt and brings maximum value.
• Identifying key technologies (cloud, platforms, automation) to invest in and the best ways to organize (embedded teams, crowdsourcing).

Speakers:
Manuel Geitz, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Tracy Woo, Senior Analyst, Forrester

Dependable technology is essential to business resilience. Historically, this meant infrastructure that never failed, minimal change, and stifled innovation. In the modern world, this means leveraging bundles services and platforms to enable fast innovation with the right guardrails. To help their business innovate without exposing the organization to risk, companies are embracing platform-driven innovation.

This session will cover:

• The latest technology practices, including chaos engineering, active-active deployment, scale-out architectures, etc.
• Key technologies such as infrastructure as code, infrastructure automation, Kubernetes, and public cloud.

Speakers:
Naveen Chhabra, Principal Analyst, Forrester

The use cases for low-code have reached a tipping point. As low-code platforms are used for more critical business challenges — including creating significant portions of commercial software products — technology leaders must ensure that best practices are followed, such as automated testing, governance, and compliance, without compromising development speed or alienating low-code developers. To meet these challenges, organizations must learn how to properly apply the principles of DevOps to low-code.

During this session, we will:

• Introduce the audience to the practices and tools of low-code plus DevOps.
• Explain how it’s both the same and different from DevOps for traditional coding.
• Review the benefits of this approach and some compelling use case examples.

Speakers:
John Bratincevic, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Christopher Condo, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Tomorrow’s digital experiences will involve a number of emerging technologies from generative AI and extended reality to virtual worlds, super apps, and possibly the metaverse. How do you prioritize what to invest in today and what to leave for later?

During this session, we will discuss:

• The expected evolution of consumer digital experiences over the next 10 years.
• The role of emerging technologies in enabling those experiences.
• Methodologies that companies can use to prioritize their investments.

Speakers:
Julie Ask, Vice President, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Whatever change you are leading your team through, one thing will emerge as true: The ability to successfully execute on change depends on a holistic approach to designing, measuring, and executing a change strategy. That holistic approach is within the control of leaders, not individual contributors, and most leaders do this poorly. Drawing on Forrester’s latest surveys of thousands of leaders and workers across eight countries, this session will help leaders understand the following key insights:

• There are individual characteristics that make change management easier — and ones that make it more challenging.
• The way that your team perceives change can differ based on how you lead them.
• Transparent, empathetic processes can lead to more change engagement from your team.

Speakers:
Katy Tynan, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Lay out a framework to address the issue of identifying, measuring, and managing the business impact of your technology decisions. By extending technical debt into a framework that includes the impact on risk, compliance, governance, legal implications, organizational structure, processes, infrastructure, maturity, and personnel, Forrester’s research can help you comprehensively address what and how technology choices should be made.

In this session, we will:

• Visualize the impact of technical debt across different dimensions (financial, personnel, process, legal, organizational, risk, et al.).
• Develop a comprehensive understanding of the impact of technology choices so that optimal decisions can be made.

Speakers:
Alvin Nguyen, Senior Analyst, Forrester

Our employees are our greatest advantage and yet one of our most challenging risks. With shortening employee tenures, rollbacks on remote work, the great exodus, tech layoffs, skill gaps, etc., organizations increasingly see their workforce as a major risk factor. Organizations must ensure that their workers can be productive regardless of location, that tasks can be executed by multiple individuals, that knowledge doesn’t solely live with an individual, and that human error is eliminated as much as possible. To address personnel risks, companies are investing in employee experience, modernizing knowledge management, embracing automation and robotics, and transforming admin roles to become site reliability engineers.

This panel will talk through the latest resilience innovations in the workforce, such as chatbots, robots working alongside humans, SRE, knowledge management as part of agile, storytelling, TuringBots, and more.

Speakers:
Julie Mohr, Senior Analyst, Forrester
Brent Ellis, Senior Analyst, Forrester
Lauren Nelson, VP, Research Director, Forrester
Craig Le Clair, Vice President, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Whether they know it or not, enterprise development shops have become the centerpoint of business innovation and competitive advantage. Many of today’s customers of even the most conservative industries such as financial institutions only interact with a business via a technology product or service. Cloud and cloud-native patterns brought global scale to the everyday enterprise, but cloud-native standards like Kubernetes can impose complexities on development teams that stifle their ability to focus on delivering innovative, world-class experiences for their customers. Enterprises must find the sweet spot between performant, resilient platforms and the right amount of development complexity that they can take on to drive growth and innovation in their software and for the business.

During this session, we will:

• Discuss how application development enterprises should approach leveraging Kubernetes without stifling developer experience, innovation, and productivity.
• Uncover cloud-native development best practices for enterprises to get the most out of their platform investments.

Speakers:
Devin Dickerson, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Investing in emerging technology is fundamentally a risk-reward decision. Our data shows that better risk-takers reap bigger rewards, but they also fail more often. In this session, we will present Forrester’s emerging technology risk framework and discuss how you use it to accelerate your innovation strategy.

During this session, we will discuss:

• Using cybersecurity to accelerate innovation and increase emerging tech adoption.
• Allowing cybersecurity to find the unintended consequences of your initiatives.
• Building an enduring competitive advantage through trust.

Speakers:
Jeff Pollard, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Tech leaders are facing a talent crunch; it is harder, takes longer, and costs more to attract the talent they need. The most successful leaders create an adaptive organization that continuously develops and applies knowledge and skills to drive resilience, creativity, and innovation — and, in doing so, outperform their peers. This session will provide tech executives with a skills-based strategy that will address the evolving complexity of today’s talent crunch in preparation for whatever uncertainty that tomorrow’s talent issues will bring. This session will help clients:

• Realign the end-to-end recruitment process to identify and capture skills.
• Expand learning opportunities to drive the continuous development of skills.
• Build performance objectives that encourage skill development.

Speakers:
Fiona Mark, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Technical debt weighs down organizational agility, hinders creativity, and erodes resilience. Its definition has expanded over the years: Organizations now recognize it in many forms, such as application, software, vendor product, security, knowledge, asset, and others. A systematic approach to measuring and acting on it is essential.

In this session, we will discuss:

• Current best practices for managing technical debt as reported by Forrester clients.
• An integrated data capture and reporting approach that closes the loop with planning, investment, and delivery to achieve a continuous, virtuous cycle of debt optimization.

Speakers:
Charles Betz, Research Director, Forrester

Technology resilience is more than a fast return to operations and high availability metrics. A good resilience strategy supports a business’s ability to adapt in the face of crisis and provides a foundation for innovation and creativity. Mature organizations are using resilience strategies that focus on understanding and leveraging risk for innovation. Instead of putting all technology under lock and key, they learn from controlled chaos and encourage experimentation with the right guardrails in place. To pivot your organization to this new way of thinking, start by gaining insight into the innovation coming from your peers. This panel highlights the innovative resilience of enterprises like yours.

Key takeaways:

• Leaders plan for technology resilience by architecting systems and enacting processes that promote resilience goals aligned with business strategy.
• Organizations that build a flexible technology resilience strategy can innovate safely both in pre-production and production.
• Technology resilience is a key competency for businesses looking to increase their ability to use technology creatively and have the ability to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances.

Speakers:
Brent Ellis, Senior Analyst, Forrester

In this session, we present how to use design thinking, modern composable and distributed hybrid architectures for sustainable, extensible, and secure enterprises supporting large-scale initiatives. We will discuss design patterns and principles to create a seamless, hybrid, hyper-scaled, and globally distributed computing organization, and detail automation of regulatory processes for evolving industry requirements. By applying these architectures and design patterns, organizations can transform their operations, making composable Enterprise Architecture a key driver of digital landscape modernization and team success.

During this session, we will discuss:

• Design thinking and how to measure value in design, as well as interconnectivity and interoperability standards
• How to apply pragmatic vendor management and how to solve the skills gap
• How to create a clear roadmap to modern composable architecture

Speakers:
Christopher Lundy, Principal Enterprise Architect, Seagen

Forrester coined the term TuringBot in 2020, when we saw the potential for machine-learning algorithms supplementing parts of the software development lifecycle. This applied AI is one of the hottest but least well-known emerging technologies that could accelerate your firm’s code development by an order of magnitude. The question is: How far will they go, and how fast?

During this session, we will discuss:

• TuringBot fundamentals — why and how they work.
• Developer productivity and team productivity.
• The future of software development — where TuringBots will go.

Speakers:
Mike Gualtieri, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Many organizations have treated their employees like disposable assets from which they need to extract value. Research has shown that when workers report high levels of cultural alignment, belonging, and well-being within their employee experience, they have more capacity and higher engagement, making the path to sustained excellence substantially more attainable. Together, these conditions create workforce actualization whereby the organization benefits from each employee’s willingness and ability to sustain excellence.

This session will help clients:

• Understand what happens at the intersection of culture energy, employee well-being, and belonging.
• Situate workforce actualization in the context of business success to enhance both.

Speakers:
Angelina Gennis, Senior Analyst, Forrester
Jonathan Roberts, Senior Analyst, Forrester

If it is true that modern technologies are tomorrow’s technical debt, how can enterprises modernize without sowing the seeds for future deficits? Enterprises must structure IT third-party relationships to maximize agility and transformation value. By reviewing current third-party IT product and service engagement models, optimizing vendor selection processes, and building effective relationship management strategies, enterprises can increase the efficiency with which partners can deliver the right capabilities while managing the pace of change.

This session will help attendees:

• Minimize risk when engaging with service providers for modernization.
• Structure vendor contracts to avoid accumulation of future tech debt.

Speakers:
Akshara Naik Lopez, Senior Analyst, Forrester
Bill Martorelli, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Your systems are going down. Where do you begin to diagnose the issue and get back up and running? Your customers are frustrated with their experience. How do you engage with real-time data to address it? This has been the reality for enterprises for too long and must change. Downtime and, more broadly, bad experiences put your brand at risk with customers. Companies are bringing two-way symptom diagnosis and AI insights into their operations to better understand issues in real time and even prevent them before they occur. Using modern monitoring observability and AIOps, companies are revolutionizing the way that they address application and system health.

This session will give real examples of these technologies in action and help your organization think about the larger processes and skills needed to take advantage of these technologies.

Speakers:
Carlos Casanova, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Business leaders prioritize both innovation and security, but security cannot stifle innovation. Minimum viable security (MVS) bridges the two by aligning security requirements with the product’s context and the development team’s agility. MVS helps product leaders ensure that the early-stage products that drive hypergrowth don’t lose momentum due to critical security issues or unwieldy security processes.

During this session, we will:

• Explain how an MVS approach adds the right level of security into early-stage products and positions them for security success later, without stymieing innovation today.
• Provide a framework and best practices to help product leaders collaborate with their security counterparts and understand what security issues to prioritize during early-stage product development.

Speakers:
Sandy Carielli, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Generative AI and large language models are having their “moment” in customer service (and, well … everywhere). Conversation intelligence vendors are infusing their solutions with large language models and offering generative AI features that are driving tangible value for enterprises today, improving both operational efficiency and the customer experience. Join this session to learn about use cases, leveraging generative AI, and how to buy or assemble solutions to meet your needs.

During this session, we will:

• What use cases are in-market today (and which are still cooking)?
• What value can be unlocked by leveraging generative AI in the contact center?
• What can you buy off the shelf, and how would you assemble the pieces to build your own?

Speakers:
Christina McAllister, Senior Analyst, Forrester

Tech organizations have struggled to keep up with tech talent challenges, with crucial contributors in high demand across industries. In many organizations, IT has struggled to know how to bring HR into the conversation, with their HR counterparts already overwhelmed with monitoring compliance and managing high talent turnover in general. This has led some IT departments to take on HR-like tasks such as procuring talent and managing onboarding and career development. In this session, we’ll invite tech and HR leaders to share how they manage to work together in today’s difficult talent environment, more tightly coupling their efforts.

You’ll hear:

• How tech and HR leaders understand each other’s needs more effectively.
• What tech can do to support HR’s stressful dynamics.
• How HR can guide talent-sensitive tech leaders to greater success.

Speakers:
Katy Tynan, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Future fit companies aggressively adopt AI in the enterprise tech stack but risk creating bad technical debt if they do not follow a structured approach. This session will focus on best practices for successfully implementing AI capabilities without accumulating negative technical debt in digital experience and digital operations systems.

In this session, leaders will walk away with:

• The key risks and challenges of adopting AI without considering technical debt implications.
• An understanding of how to create a governance and risk approach that supports clean adoption of AI.

Speakers:
Liz Herbert, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Chuck Gahun, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Alla Valente, Senior Analyst, Forrester

The global health pandemic and the associated supply chain disruptions made organizations hyperaware of supply chain vulnerabilities. Similarly new hybrid experiences increased expectations for inventory accuracy across the omnichannel. Leading organizations are transforming supply chain and logistics to ensure timeliness, efficiency, quality of resources, and increasingly – sustainability. For example, robotics at the edge can offload labor intensive tasks; IoT solutions can capture insight and data to execute quality checks; and complex data processing can analyze video to ensure workplace safety. And that’s just the beginning. This session will address emerging opportunities to help transform your supply chain with smart technology.

Key Takeaways:

• Evaluate opportunities to deploy IoT use cases to optimize supply chain processes.
• Identify practices to successfully power supply chain solutions with IoT solutions and smart technology.
• Prepare to address key challenges as your firm deploys IoT-enabled supply chain solutions.

Speakers:
Michele Pelino, Principal Analyst, Forrester

The simple build-vs.-buy framing is handy but usually based on outdated assumptions and wishful thinking about software and digital business. It underestimates the complexity and cost of packaged solutions as well as the value of platforms and their ecosystems. And it overestimates the cost and complexity of modern custom development as well as the similarities between firms in a truly adaptive digital environment. For an effective digital enterprise, pure buy doesn’t exist, and pure build is often impractical. The real question for any given software decision is: Shall we customize a packaged app or compose software components to obtain the custom solution we need?

During this session, we will:

• Explain how to create an adaptable software culture.
• Give you three specific strategies for how to get started no matter where you are today.

Speakers:
Joe Cicman, Senior Analyst, Digital Transformation, Forrester
Manuel Geitz, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Several technologies that Forrester covers should come with a “buyer beware” label. This panel will discuss why the audience needs to approach quantum computing and Web3 with more than a single grain of salt and will attempt to answer the question of if, and when, either one of these will live up to its full potential.

During this session, we will discuss:

• The state and future of quantum computing, including the security implications.
• The state and future of Web3 as it relates to enterprise use cases.
• The myths and pitfalls of these technologies, and why both will need five or more years to yield significant benefits for most firms.

Speakers:
Brian Hopkins, VP, Emerging Tech Portfolio, Forrester
David Mooter, Senior Analyst, Forrester
Mike Gualtieri, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester