(2017-05-22) Boyd Multi Emerging Technologies Maps

Stowe Boyd compares some other folks' maps of emerging technologies.

I start out with an acute awareness of the dizzying changes going on in the enterprise. The promise of digital transformation, AI, cloud computing, and myriad other technologies of nearly unprecedented scale and scope is more like a tsunami than the gentle adoption graphs popularized by Geoffrey Moore in his Crossing the Chasm series. A new wave of innovation and disruption drops on our heads every week, it seems, rather than the old-school annual product drops of the early part of this century... I am deeply lazy, and so I decided to take a look at the maps of some analyst firms, namely Gartner Inc and Forrester Research.

Perhaps the single most used approach is to tier layers of technologies in a stack, where the user is positioned at the top of the model immediately in contact with various applications or user interfaces, and at the bottom are arrayed the most foundational of technologies. This approach is too limited, I believe, to cover the spectrum of emerging technologies, but there is a degree of up/downness in the models that others are using, nonetheless.

The use of a ‘Systems Of’ approach has a long history. People have been making the distinction of ‘systems of record’, ‘systems of engagement’, and various other ‘systems of’ for decades. It feels like ‘systems of insight technologies’ is a replacement for and extension of the historic ‘systems of record’ where the core purpose has been extended from storage and retrieval of information to the analysis and insight from those resources.