“Did you see the article about blockchain on the paper’s home page? I think we need blockchain, too.”

“We should give all our IT to an offshore system integrator—that will save a lot of money. Our competitors are doing the same thing.”

“We need to do something about generative AI right away!”

Many who work in IT have heard variations of these statements from well-meaning senior colleagues. And given how much technology underpins so many trends, as well as the increasing pace of innovation, IT leaders can expect to hear more of them and feel pressure to act on them.

Sometimes it makes a lot of sense to act quickly on a trend. Innovation, after all, is a hallmark of successful companies. But not all trends are created equal. The annals of many IT organisations are littered with bold initiatives in trends that created a lot of excitement but not much value.

Moving quickly to chase a trend often bogs an organisation down, leads to wasted spend, and takes attention away from important priorities.

For this reason, the ability to evaluate trends quickly and communicate their relevance to the business is becoming a critical capability for the modern CIO. In practice, it is rarely as simple as saying “yes” or “no” to investment in a particular trend.

Trends are unpredictable, change with time, and their relevance to a given business often waxes or wanes.

Instead, CIOs need a clear set of parameters to rely on both for evaluating trends and for determining which posture to take for engagement with them: first mover, fast follower, slow adopter, or sometimes non-partaker.

Four guides for determining a trend’s relevance

• Disruptive business value: The trend can result in measurable value to the business.
• Independence: The trend allows the organisation to work in smaller, more independent units.
• Connectivity: The trend reduces friction in the organisation’s connectivity.
• Extensibility: The trend can broadly shape and improve the organisation’s technology and management practices.

You don’t necessarily need a green light across each of these four parameters to make investment in a trend worthwhile. But if one of them comes up red or yellow, it’s worth taking a closer look before making a significant commitment.

And while trends often initially aim to address just one of these areas, their relevance and impact rise dramatically when they can be applied coherently to all four.

It’s worth emphasising that this evaluation isn’t a simple checklist. It requires rigor in the analysis, a willingness to review the analysis on its merits (without being influenced by how it might serve a narrow but favoured “pet” project”), and creativity—some trends aren’t particularly meaningful on their own, but in combination (virtualization and cloud, for example) can have greater potential.

1. Disruptive business value

Almost any trend or development has the potential to improve something in an organisation. The question is whether that improvement is worth what it costs. It’s important to understand the trade-offs.

You may save money or generate value in one area by adopting a certain trend, but will it cost you in another?

The most important points to determine are whether the value is to IT alone or to the business overall, whether that value is merely incremental or significant, and whether success is clearly measurable in KPIs.

If a trend improves an IT process but can’t be directly linked to a business advantage, then it’s probably not worth a significant investment.

For example, much of the benefit of cloud computing comes not from improvements to IT productivity but from how it accelerates and enables business processes and innovation.

2. Independence

One of the tech executive’s key challenges is that IT often has too many interdependencies, which leads to technical debt and administrative processes such as alignment meetings and process coordination—for example, when changes to the billing system depend on numerous other systems and development teams, meetings and delays are inevitable consequences.

The concept of “modularity” has been in vogue for almost two decades now, but the enthusiasm for it has generally not been matched in its implementation. APIs have certainly helped, but they don’t address the important organizational changes that also need to happen to reduce dependencies.

That’s where moving toward a product and platform operating model—where independent teams work on user-facing products while platform teams build capabilities to support them—can have significant impact.

Assessing how a trend can be profitably adopted and supported by either product or platform teams should be a critical criterion for evaluating its potential.

3. Connectivity

While independence is important, a trend that operates like a satellite on its own or divides the organisation up into disconnected units isn’t going to lead to at-scale impact. There is a difference between dependency, which isn’t good, and leverage, which is critical for delivering value.

That difference was clearly illustrated in enterprise service buses (ESBs), which afforded independence but required additional alignment and orchestration, sometimes through a single central team, which created a bottleneck.

Virtualisation is another trend that highlights the need to balance independence and connectivity.

In contrast, modern microservices patterns aim to both improve independence and clarify the interfaces and thus improve connectivity by reducing the need for communication or a central coordination mechanism.

“Improved connectivity” should not be misunderstood as more communications—that’s a recipe for creating more dependencies. Improved connectivity is often reached through more clarity on the interfaces, reducing the need for communication.

4. Extensibility

The impact of a technology trend increases with its applicability and coherence across the IT estate. A technology trend that touches only one part of the IT estate in isolation or is managed simply as a “tech product” does not often have the widespread impact that comes with true innovation. Impact often requires companies to think through both the technology and operational implications to open up the potential. Broad applicability is where you get to scale.

Virtualisation, microservices, or SaaS-based services, for example, were less successful when they were managed as a pure tech product. Only when combined with enabling factors on the operating side, such as agile, DevOps, and the necessary support structures (such as budgeting roles and HR support) did they have much greater impact.

Similarly, agile works best when all relevant parts of the company work in agile ways. (The impact of agile developer teams is improved when operations, for example, also work in agile ways, which is how we came to DevOps.)

The key question for the CIO, then, is how to adjust the technology estate to extend the range of applications across technology and the business.

As they say in comedy, timing is everything, and that’s just as true when it comes to trends. Going in on a trend too early or too late can sometimes be worse than doing nothing at all.

Just as important as evaluating a trend’s “bona fides”, according to the four parameters described above, is determining how best to engage with it.