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Articles by Fiona Mark
The State Of High-Performance IT, 2026
Only 37% of organizations achieve high performance across both technical excellence and business confidence. These organizations are more likely to achieve revenue objectives, outperform industry peers, report alignment between the business and IT teams, and adapt quickly to changing business conditions.
2026 US Tech Labor Market
The US tech labor market is increasingly shaped by selective hiring and uncertainty about AI’s impact on the workforce. Demand is concentrating in experienced roles tied to AI, cloud, and security; while entry-level opportunities tighten, AI is reshaping how work gets done faster than it is reducing headcount, leading many leaders to delay workforce decisions even as skill gaps grow.
Building An Adaptive IT Model For Growth And Innovation
Traditional IT operating models may struggle to keep pace with today’s dynamic business demands. And without a well-designed transformation, you risk creating misalignment, inefficiencies, and roadblocks. You need a strategic approach to designing an adaptive IT operating model that balances flexibility, governance, and business priorities. This report presents practitioner-proven practices and design principles that will help you drive business value, boost innovation, and scale successfully.
Transform Your Organization With Strategic Operating Model Change
Operating model transformation represents one of the most critical challenges technology leaders face today – the complexity requires continuous efforts to maintain alignment to the future state across hundreds of decisions, with failure resulting in an organizationunable to deliver desired outcomesreport their organizations prioritize operating model adaptations.
Organizational Design - Forrester
Blog The AI revolution has given corporate executives the perfect justification for workforce reductions they've been planning all along. While 75% of business leaders admit AI won't replace employees, 58% have slowed hiring citing AI uncertainty. From Amazon's Andy Jassy to IBM's mass HR layoffs, companies are using AI hype as cover for systematic workforce optimization that has little to do with actual technological capabilities.
Leading Through Tech Workforce Changes
Many organizations, especially federal agencies, are facing unprecedented upheaval as they implement large-scale workforce reductions. For technology leaders, many navigating this process for the first time, layoffs represent a particularly challenging leadership test that cannot be executed without significant trade-offs.
Use Skills-Based Talent Practices To Future-Proof Your Tech Organization
Tech leaders are being asked to do more with fewer resources available, which makes cultivating the right skills in the workforce essential. The implementation of generative AI (genAI) potentially brings productivity gains but is also a point of concern, with employees experiencing what one chief product officer at a tech workforce development company calls an “AI skill threat.” To make matters worse, the longevity of skills is decreasing as the rate of technological change accelerates.
4 CIO styles to boost business performance
This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback. Editor’s note: The following is a guest post from Fiona Mark, principal analyst at Forrester. Every organization today is pressing its technology leaders to deliver more value while keeping costs in check. The era of abundant tech budgets in 2020 and 2021, driven by pandemic-induced digital pivots and talent competition, contrasted sharply with the layoffs and budget constraints of 2022 and 2023.
Skills Management Can Make or Break Your Emerging Tech Plans
Rapid technological change has a powerful impact on business. Emerging technologies, like generative AI (genAI), quantum computing, and immersive reality, not only transform industries but also create a pressing need for a skilled and adaptable workforce, transforming the skill requirements of all businesses. Best-in-class skills management is critical because: Skills form the basis for improved adaptability and agility.
Skills Management Can Make or Break Your Emerging Tech Plans
/sites/all/themes/penton_subtheme_itprotoday/images/logos/footer.png Skip navigation Recent Recent Featured Opinion Alamy Rapid technological change has a powerful impact on business. Emerging technologies, like generative AI (genAI), quantum computing, and immersive reality, not only transform industries, they also create a pressing need for a skilled and adaptable workforce, transforming skill requirements of all businesses.
Find The Right Use Cases For Your Robots
Among other achievements Melonee Wise founded Fetch Robotics, and until recently she was VP of robotics automation at Zebra Technologies. I spoke to her during my early research for the automation triangle, and one of her passing comments stuck. She described physical automation (robots) as “a task replacer, not a people replacer.” Well, quite.
Key finding from Forrester’s latest BI research including The Forrester Wave™: Augmented Business Intelligence Platforms, Q2 2023
Enterprise business intelligence (BI) continues to be the last mile to insights-driven business (IDB) capabilities. No matter what technology foundation you’re using – a data lake, a data warehouse, data fabric, data mesh, etc. – BI applications are where business users consume data and turn it into actionable insights and decisions. The BI market has thrived for several decades, so much so that over the last five years, BI technology has become largely commoditized.
Generative AI will change the future of technology organizations
Finding tech talent is increasingly hard. Now, with the acceleration wrought by generative AI as well as other emerging technologies, tech leaders must build long-term strategies to address the growing demands on the technology organization. While many tech leaders had hoped that last year’s wave of tech layoffs would lead to opportunities in the marketplace, they instead have seen the number of open tech roles continue to rise, and tech unemployment hovers around 2%.
Autism Inclusion: A Steppingstone Towards Universal Inclusion
Despite economic uncertainty, the job market remains tight. This is especially true for tech workers. Yet there is an under-tapped labor resource to help address this problem. Although people with autistic traits are more likely to pursue STEM degrees, they are disproportionately overqualified for the roles they are in. Forrester found recruiting and management practices that don’t select candidate merit as effectively as commonly thought. Such practices can turn away qualified autistic candidates.
Gen Z Offers To Transform Your Organization
Gen Z employees, the generation born between 1997 and 2012, are entering your organization and will account for 27% of the workforce by 2025. To counter the myths and misconceptions about Gen Z, we surveyed thousands of Gen Zs in multiple countries. The results of this research are summarized in the report Ready Or Not, Gen Z Is Already In Your Workforce. Understanding this data will help you successfully integrate Gen Z employees and reap the benefits: Narrow the skills gap in your organization.
Navigating The Digital Whirlwind: The Asia Pacific Tech Market Is Poised For 5.8% Growth Amid Economic Flux
The tide of COVID-19 has finally receded. As Asia’s economies repopulate the global economic shoreline, they find the beach littered with new opportunities and new threats. Not even half a year in, 2023 already feels like a pivotal year between two eras of digitization. As 2023 progresses, the Asia Pacific technology market is a cauldron of opportunities set against an equally challenging backdrop, a tussle between the old and the new.
What Makes A Future Fit People Strategy?
Over the past few weeks, my colleagues have described how platforms, practices, and partners drive a future fit technology strategy. But one element underpins the entire strategy — people. As a result, organizations must adopt practices that allow them to unlock the full potential of their employees through positive employee experience.
Use a Skills-Based Strategy to Address the Tech Talent Crunch
Technology leaders are operating in a world of uncertainty -- and, increasingly, constraint. While Forrester is still predicting that the tech market will grow, it’s clear that tech leaders will need to implement strategies that manage the downside while building upside for the eventual market rebound. As a result, organizations must become adaptive -- that is, they must infuse flexibility into their IT operating model in order to respond quickly to evolving dynamics. The reward?
Tech companies may be laying off employees, but tech workers are still in demand
The last six months of labor headlines have been a switcheroo for anyone following the tech industry. We’ve gone from heady reports of companies competing to buy talent and onboarding hundreds of new employees every week to almost daily reports of the latest layoffs. Perhaps the greatest bubble indicator was that in 2021 there were more job postings for tech recruiters than software engineers. According to layoffs.fyi, there have been over 130,000 tech layoffs this year.
Build an Adaptive Tech Team to Navigate a Potential Recession
Are the tides turning in the tech talent market? High-profile tech firms have generated headlines in the last few weeks as Netflix, Zillow, Carvana among others have announced layoffs, while other large tech firms including Salesforce and Meta have announced hiring freezes or slowdowns. However, digging into the data, the layoffs at these organizations are not hitting tech.
Will Human-Centered Transformation Enable Greater Creativity in Tech: Original
Over the last decade, we’ve been on a wild ride of digital transformation. Technology capabilities that were previously unheard of are now commonplace or even considered retro today. In the last decade, we’ve gone from being able to look up a restaurant menu on a desktop to being able to track our deliveries in real time through apps on our phones. The pandemic spurred digital adoption at rates considered unfathomable before, but the opportunity to create value through digital is shrinking.
Adaptive Firms Outperform The Competition
We have heard it again and again: the pace of change has never been faster, and it is not going to slow down. To win, the most successful organizations will those who are able to capitalize on this market dynamism. Forrester finds that firms with a future fit strategy succeed in this new reality by being able to reconfigure their core business concepts to create and deliver value to meet customer needs. And the difference is compelling.
Learn to be more adaptive so you can outperform your competitors
Adaptive Firms Outperform The Competition One of the key lessons learned during the pandemic is that every organization must learn to expect and deal with change and uncertainty. We have heard it again and again: The pace of change has never been faster, and it is not going to slow down. And technology executives are often right in the middle of that change. Early in 2021, Forrester predicted that a fifth of tech-lagging Fortune 500 companies won’t make it out of the year whole.
2021年预测：区块链将开启快慢双轨道
2020年对于分布式账本技术（DLT，又名区块链）来说，是值得回看的一年。新冠疫情强化了许多已经存在的趋势。更为实际和务实的区块链项目也在一段时间内成为主流，越来越多的纯科研项目的预算逐渐与业务独立开来，也越来越难获批。 新冠疫情爆发后，情况迅速改变。纯实验和投机性的项目预算在今年被砍。长期的战略项目时间线则被拉长，尤其是那些需要改变市场结构和要求监管变化的项目。另一方面，具有明显收益的项目不仅在继续，而且以更快的速度发展。针对由疫情凸显出来的供应链问题，也有更多的一些企业愿意参与到网络中帮助其解决问题。 Forrester预测，在2021年里： 全球范围内，30%的项目将投入生产。这不仅反映了我们提到的项目更为现实与技术日益成熟的趋势，还反映了新冠疫情在短期对可衡量收益的促成和加速作用。大多数从试点过渡到生产阶段的区块链网络将在企业区块链平台上运行。...
Dapr: Service Mesh Done Right?
With the recent announcement that Dapr has reached its first production-ready release, we finally see a viable response to Istio and perhaps the rest of the service mesh industry from Microsoft. If you’re not familiar, Dapr is a coding framework intended to solve the challenges of modern distributed applications. You may be asking, “But isn’t that what a service mesh is for?” Yes, except that service meshes have the wrong focus.
How To Monetize Open Finance: Monetize Value, Price The Use Case
Open finance is driven not by regulators, but by technologies like open APIs. This is steadily changing distribution patterns within the industry towards embedded finance – a world of connectivity, financial services meeting the needs of customers in the moment, in cars, in virtual agents, in shopping apps, in online marketplaces. If you are asking “how do we monetize open banking,” you need to broaden your scope, because the role of banks is changing. What you deliver is changing.
Think Local to Stay Ahead of the Competition
For the last several decades, organizations have been focused on creating solutions that allows them to reach the maximum number of customers with the minimum cost, with a focus on growing global, scalable operations. Cloud computing and reduced complexity in integrating services have enabled tech organizations to support the growing global ambitions of organizations, such as organizations have with development teams in Estonia and network teams in the United States.
How To Accelerate A Cultural Employee Experience Shift In Europe
The current crisis proves that having great Employee Experience (EX) is critical to the brand and the CMO. EX was already a key driver of customer experience (CX) and business performance. Today’s crises require brands to meaningfully engage employees even more. In fact, our latest data (see figure below) has shown that the correlation between employee experience, consumer experience and business performance is higher than ever in Europe.
GameStop Could Happen To You, So Prepare For It Now
If you were watching GameStop (among others) thinking that your organization would not be victim to groups of organizers, you may want to think again. This is not a one-off incident. Earlier this summer, K-pop fans mobilized via TikTok to claim tickets to a Trump campaign rally they had no intention of attending to artificially boost attendance projections, and embarrass the President and campaign organizers.
Why You Should Care About Sustainability
Photo by Abhijit Sunil We all live on a nice but increasingly perturbed planet called Earth. If you have anything to do with technology, you need to consider a sustainability strategy — both personally and professionally for your enterprise. The technology industry is in the sustainability spotlight for many good reasons — not the least of which is that information and communications technology equipment alone is responsible for about 1.4 % of total global carbon emissions.
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