Put Your Emerging-Technology Strategy Into A Business Context

CIOs' interest in emerging technologies to drive innovative new business value is at a three-year peak — having been significantly throttled by the recession but coming back at a feverish pitch. But in many cases, pursuit of these technologies is only opportunistic — project-based point solutions. Instead, CIOs should build an emerging-technology strategy based on the importance to their firm of three key business trends: balancing enterprisewide/global synergies against local differentiation, agile sourcing of business services, and competing by offering services within Digital Business Networks (DBNs). Based on these business realities, the CIO can develop an emerging-tech road map, using new technologies to increase transparency, improve agility, and provide flexible integration. To manage the deployment of these technologies in support of the business trends, CIOs should enable business technology success, while moving IT to a business services model and using a business architecture to tie together the emerging-tech and business strategies.