Brief: How I&O Leaders Should Prepare For Apple's Leap Into The Wearables Market

Wearables offer enterprises powerful tools for empowering workers and engaging customers. As company-owned devices, devices like Google Glass are already helping employees such as surgeons perform their jobs more effectively. As an interaction technology, wearables strategies can focus on devices distributed to customers (like Disney's successful MagicBand) or on customer-owned devices (like Samsung smartwatches). But the wearables revolution won't reach escape velocity until a vendor can create a vigorous ecosystem of real-world entities — retailers, banks, hospitals, and governments — to make wearables useful in peoples' everyday lives. Enter Apple, which will galvanize the wearables revolution with its release of the iWatch (or, some rumors say, the iTime) later in 2014 or sometime in 2015. This report for infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders is a companion piece to a report for CMOs, "Brief: How To Prepare For Apple's Leap Into The Wearables Market," and is a primer on what Forrester believes will happen and how you can take advantage of Apple's soon-to-be-released wearable device.