In a complex, uncertain and volatile world, the pace of digital change is faster than ever. Looking ahead is critical to success. These reports provide insights into major business and technology trends that will help you stay ahead and make smarter decisions for your organization.
Gartner Special Reports
Scaling Digital Leadership- Keep the Momentum Going
March 2019
Digital transformation has been the CIO mandate for years: it requires sustained effort . In this research collection, we will explore the dimensions of leadership that will help you scale, personally and as an organization, in order to produce sustained return on technology investment
The Future of Data and Analytics is Now
March 2019
Data and analytics leaders are driving digital transformation, creating monetization opportunities, radically improving customer experience and reshaping industries. The time is right for them to exploit data in order to inform smarter actions that drive better, consistent organizational outcomes.
Predicts 2019: Leadership Means Expanding Options, Not Limiting Them
January 2019
The IT industry is a copycat industry, where each company borrows from others as often as it creates something new. Our future predictions help CIOs avoid letting the success or failure of others limit their options.
Cool Vendors 2018: Expanding Digital Innovation and How to Master It
January 2019
Digital innovation is about creating new value scenarios using technology. CIOs must learn how Cool Vendors can provide the tools and technologies to make innovation more feasible.
Getting to the Details of the Digital Platform
December 2018
Create your roadmap toward a digital business technology platform. Building a digital business technology platform is critical to long-term digital business success, but most CIOs struggle with where to begin.
Getting Started With Data Literacy
December 2018
With rise of digital transformation and the need for businesses to create a digital workforce, employee data literacy has never been more important. Leaders, creators and consumers of digital solutions need to be able to speak data in a common way.
2019 Planning Guide Overview: Architecting Your Digital Ecosystem
October 2018
Technical professionals are confronting increasingly complex technology ecosystems. They must overcome this complexity to create solutions that will transform their organization into a digital business. This report provides a summary of the most important trends across 10 key technology areas.
Laying the Foundation for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
October 2018
Now more than ever, technical professionals must focus on developing the foundational components needed to support artificial intelligence and machine learning in the enterprise. This special report gathers a range of research that will help accomplish that goal.
AI Use Cases, Tales From the Trenches: A Gartner Trend Insight Report
October 2018
The most common problems are well-known: identifying optimal use cases, realistically scoping the AI project, sourcing the required staff and skills, and gathering the high-quality data in adequate volume. Start today the work of mastering and deploying AI techniques for business value.
Blockchain Technology Spectrum: A Gartner Theme Insight Report
October 2018
The impact of blockchain’s trust mechanisms and interaction paradigms extends beyond today’s business, and will affect the economy, society and governance.
Top Strategic Predictions for 2019 and Beyond: Practicality Exists Within Instability
October 2018
Technology-based change is happening continuously, and most organizations struggle to see the change in advance. Continuous change can begin to seem like chaos. CIOs in end-user organizations must learn to find practical approaches within the chaos.
Maverick* Insights Reveal Agility as the Prime Source of Power: A Gartner Trend Insight Report
October 2018
In a world of shifting power structures, it’s often difficult to know what to do. Gartner publishes Maverick* research with the aim of identifying unconventional possibilities for CIOs and other IT leaders to consider as they make their daily planning, investment and operational decisions. This year’s Maverick* Special Report challenges notions of conventional power. Agility, redefined for digital business, emerges as a surprisingly strong form of power.
The Evolution of IoT and Its Impact on Adopters and Technology Providers: A Gartner Trend Insight Report
September 2018
In this latest IoT special report, we will share best practices for how IoT TSPs and adopters of IoT can best take advantage of IoT’s opportunities while avoiding some of the common traps. We will highlight how TSPs can evolve their products and solutions, overhaul GTM planning and messaging, and better enable selling efforts. And we will share how organizations adopting IoT — both the makers of the “things” in IoT and the owners/operators of “things” — are implementing and managing IoT projects to extract maximum business value.
The Edge Completes the Cloud: A Gartner Theme Insight Report
September 2018
Edge computing is a decentralized swing of the pendulum, with a difference. We believe the gravity (benefits) of the cloud to be so great that the pendulum simply stops.
The Future of Your Business Ecosystem in the Age of Digital Business
September 2018
Digital technologies continue to drive business innovation. We’re in the midst of platform-based business models and seeing the beginning of distributed ecosystems based on technologies. Organizations must design new, creative business models and create the underlying operating models. This shift to the business ecosystem requires a business transformation approach.
2018 Hype Cycles: Riding the Innovation Wave
August 2018
The hype around all things digital shows no sign of easing, with many organizations focused on digital business transformation. There are many innovative technologies to choose from. The challenge facing executives is understanding where their organization needs to innovate, and what technologies are relevant. Gartner’s Hype Cycles can help. downside risk.
The Resilience Premium of Digital Business
May 2018
Committing to resilience will equip your digital business with the mindset, resources and planning to recover from inevitable disruptions.
Leaders must anticipate disruptions and prepare the organization to return to stability in a short time. The complexity of digital business makes preparations especially difficult. A resilient digital organization requires orchestration across business and technology domains. The following research defines and provides an overview of organizational resilience, the delivery model, how it affects application architecture and the potential downside risk.
Realizing the Benefits of Superior Customer Experience: A Gartner Trend Insight Report
May 2018
Those involved with CX initiatives are increasingly being asked to think with both their hearts and their heads. That’s to be expected as the field comes of age. Now that leadership and processes are in place, CFOs and finance directors are asking if investing in CX is worth it. They expect a financial return. Project proposals without a financial business case are more likely to be turned down. Nearly half of organizations in a Gartner survey claimed they can track the financial benefits of CX projects, while Gartner’s marketing leaders survey shows that over 80% of organizations expect to compete mainly based on CX, meaning that the skill of realizing benefits will be in high demand.
Deliver Artificial Intelligence Business Value
April 2018
Organizations aspire to exploit artificial intelligence for major and measurable gains in business value. This Gartner Special Report guides IT leaders in targeting the most promising business opportunities for AI and successfully delivering AI capabilities for those opportunities.
IoT Implementation and Management — From the Edge to the Cloud
April 2018
As organizations embark on their digitalization journey, a well-formulated IoT strategy is indispensable. Some choose to focus on IoT’s external benefits first, including generating new revenue streams, enhancing customer service and increasing engagement. Others initially target internal benefits, such as optimizing asset utilization and improving worker safety and security. Currently, the internal benefits of IoT are driving its adoption.
Willful Disruption — Scaling, Operating and Changing the Digital Game
April 2018
Creating a willful intent strategy for digital disruption is a critical component for IT and TSP business leaders. Such a strategy helps them to prepare for challenges they may face but also to capitalize on innovations and cultural imperatives needed to scale and transform.
The term “disruption” typically brings to mind for people a particular digital giant (e.g., Airbnb, Facebook, Google, Uber, WeWork). For IT leaders, it might conjure thoughts of technologies like blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML), or augmented/virtual reality. For many, it may also invoke the notion that their organization’s place in its market is subject to the whim of such digital giants, which have a seemingly innate ability to conquer through the implementation of those technologies.
But in fact, digital disruption is so much more.
Gartner Worldwide IT Spending Forecast
April 2018
The Gartner Worldwide IT Spending Forecast is the leading indicator of major technology trends across the devices, IT services, data center systems, enterprise software and telecom services markets, and across geographies. IT and business executives are using these highly anticipated quarterly reports as they refine their strategy and roadmap to prioritize investments and identify opportunities within the IT market, and to base their critical business decisions on proven methodologies.
Fostering Data Literacy and Information as a Second Language
March 2018
The emergence of data and analytics capabilities, including artificial intelligence, requires creators and consumers to “speak data” as a common language. Data and analytics leaders must champion workforce data literacy as an enabler of digital business, and treat information as a second language.
People, process and technology. These are the three elements common to all business change. Any organization undergoing a digital transformation must factor in a fourth key element: data.
Not only must organizations take steps to educate professionals who are involved in crafting data-driven solutions, products and services, they must make sure those steps achieve the goal of teaching all relevant employees to speak data as their new second language, as well as developing and nurturing communities where the language will flourish.
Creating Digital Value at Scale
March 2018
The idea of digital business transformation is resonating with broader business leadership, in part due to CIO efforts to present new opportunities and threats. This is not the time for CIOs to relax; instead, they should intensify their efforts to achieve digital business success. Industries are being reshaped, and winners and losers are emerging. Most organizations are still dabbling in digital, not recognizing how fast the transition is happening.
According to our Digital Enterprise 2020 survey, two-thirds of executive leaders believe that their companies must pick up the pace of digitalization to remain competitive. Executives are eager to capture new opportunities, yet feel they cannot create the urgency to move within their own organizations. CIOs need to help build momentum to scale and create value from digital business.
How to Lead Supply Chain in the Big Shift to Sustainable Business
March 2018
Business growth remains the number one objective of CEOs, but leaders must reconcile this ambition with the limits imposed by the world’s finite supply of natural resources.
Supply chain’s expertise can help companies achieve growth, profitability and social purpose in a resource-constrained world. This Gartner Special Report will help chief supply chain officers set strategies for leading the end-to-end value network in a transition to sustainable business.
Cool Vendors 2018: Technologies and Business Come Together to Solve Hard Problems
February 2018
CIOs attempting digital transformation will like many kinds of Cool Vendors. Cool Vendors exist across all major areas of technology innovation. Those that stand out do so because they offer some disruptive capability or opportunity. In the current atmosphere of fast mode, rapid change, CIOs are at a disadvantage in trying to keep up.
Predicts 2018: Stimulate Creativity to Generate Success
December 2017
The future is not yet written. This implies an expectation that events will occur in their own time. However, CIOs don’t always have the luxury of waiting for the future to unfold. In the world of digital technologies, the shifting tides of technology, behavior, and business outcomes, those who wait are more likely to be left behind than to be prepared for the flood. CIOs and technology business unit leaders must follow the trends but prepare for a digital reality where the problems of the past are yet to be eliminated. Gartner’s 2018 predictions are broad and deep. They reach across the most significant areas of IT and the IT industry. Track these predictions throughout 2018 and use them to frame the strategic planning assumptions that will drive your business in the next decade.
Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2018
October 2017
Our top 10 strategic technology trends are rapidly-evolving breakout trends with the most disruptive potential through 2022. These are the trends that IT cannot afford to ignore. The 2018 trends underpin the digital platform and set the stage for business innovation.
Scaling Digital Business Requires the Continuous Delivery of Incremental Value
October 2017
An IT operating model that centers only on the activities of the IT organization will be inadequate for executing a digital strategy. CIOs who want their organizations to deliver incremental value continuously and at scale require a transformation to the value-optimizing operating model.
The Future of Work and Talent: Culture, Diversity, Technology
October 2017
The future of work is about forging a new relationship between technology and talent that transforms existing ways of working and doing business. The technology we invent and use shapes us in many ways — in our relationships, businesses and communities, in how we work and how we organize work. This has always been the case. Prehistoric agriculture technology caused repetitive motion disorders, as do modern digital devices. Today, younger generations prefer texting to calling. We‘re still sorting out the human and productivity implications of remote work technologies. Disruptive new technologies continue to emerge, compelling employees to adapt and respond ever faster. Large-scale, long-term changes in technology, diversity and culture are transforming more than just jobs. They are transforming the meaning and value of work and the reasons we work.
Implementing and Executing Your Internet of Things Strategy
October 2017
The rise of the IoT places IT in a difficult position. Business units and stakeholders demand IoT solutions, often before understanding the mechanics of IoT value creation. IT is then asked to present both a cogent and an insightful pathway that drives business value, fosters innovation and incurs a low execution risk.
Unlike other new technologies, the adoption of IoT modifies and enhances existing services and products, which are already essential to the organization and its customers.
Previous Gartner research collections have shown how business IoT plans are moving through the early phases of design to reality. However, complexity and lack of organizational experience are making the path to innovation a long one.
In this collection, we feature research that proactively addresses those complexities, to help you accelerate IoT implementation. This set of research focuses on three key themes underlying successful IoT transformation — establish leadership, design for success and execute effectively.
Make Digital Business Transformation a Practical Reality
October 2017
Business transformation is complicated, involving a constant tug-of-war between strategic vision and operational execution. One can’t succeed without the other, yet few of us are comfortable in both camps. Digital business is a disruptive transformation that’s not possible to achieve without the visionaries among us willing to push the boundaries of what’s possible without sweating the details. Gartner has been working over the past three years to help IT and business executives develop their digital business ambition and to create the catalyst that will propel their organizations into action.
This Special Report is written for those of you leaders who are responsible for IT, marketing, product development, supply chain and customer service and must convert this digital business vision into a practical reality.
Maverick* Insights Drive Creative Destruction of Business as Usual
October 2017
Digitalization’s effects bring confusion, turmoil and even upheaval to society, technology, business and life. Our Maverick research examines how digitalization increasingly affects not simply business itself but business in its multifarious relationships with the surrounding society, which itself is changing because of digitalization. In such a complex, changing environment, conventional thinking and acting will cripple your and your organization’s ability to respond, survive and thrive. These reports will help you be forward-looking and forward-thinking, and offer new perspectives for you to leverage the trends and insights affecting your IT strategy and your organization.
This research covers digital society repercussions, hidden implications of technology, business turbulence on the horizon and the erosion of trust in business.
*By its nature, Maverick work may not agree with Gartner’s official positions. We intentionally don’t subject it to the full consensus-based approval process that we apply to mainstream Gartner research.
Make CRM and Customer Experience a Technical Reality
September 2017
Behind every successful customer experience lives a complex, highly integrated and tightly orchestrated ecosystem of events, content, technologies and skills that must come together to make the customer experience a reality. The CRM segment today comprises dozens of functional areas, spanning sales, commerce, marketing and customer service, and it provides highly specialized functionality, data analysis and insight.
CRM technology is fundamental to the customer experience. That customer experience drives revenue, which in turn drives more investment in optimizing and monetizing that customer experience.
Business Benefits of the Internet of Things
September 2017
To move beyond proofs of concept, CIOs and CEOs want to see evidence of hard returns on investment for how IoT improves business processes, optimizes operations, enhances workforce productivity, increases revenue and drives customer loyalty in a quantifiable manner. Several companies remain coy about publicizing their returns, perhaps to maintain a competitive advantage or due to the early-stage nature of their projects.
In this report, we include the latest IoT survey findings and compiled research to examine how IoT benefits organizations. The IoT journey will continue to uncover tangible and intangible benefits as it becomes the technology foundation for digital business.
Top Strategic Predictions for 2018 and Beyond: Pace Yourself, for Sanity’s Sake
September 2017
The future is filled with disruption. But, the pending disruptions are taking on new forms. The relationship between people and machines are changing forever and our expectations for how the world will evolve are changing, too. To cope, CIOs in end-user organizations must learn to develop an appropriate pace for digital change.
Gartner for Technical Professionals: 2018 Planning Guide Overview
September 2017
We live in an era of exponential change, driven not only by advances in specific technologies, such as AI and marketing analytics, but also by the way those technologies are combined (for example, marketing analytics powered by AI). Today, keeping up with the trends in your core discipline is not enough — you must also understand what is happening in adjacent disciplines. And therein lies the challenge: How can you learn about the most important trends for a variety of technologies while immersed in your day-to-day activities?
Hype Cycles: Highlight Enterprise and Ecosystem Digital Disruptions
August 2017
Leading CIOs are engaged across and outside their enterprises to create new business opportunities and improve operational effectiveness. No matter the industry, maturity, region or size, businesses cannot survive in today’s globally connected economy without technology-enabling business. The world’s most successful companies use technology to scale and outcompete traditional organizations. The year’s Hype Cycles are designed to help CIOs and IT leaders respond to the opportunities and threats affecting their businesses, take the lead in technology-enabled business innovations and help their organizations define an effective digital business strategy.
Capitalizing on Your Business Ecosystems
July 2017
Innovations in technology have driven ever-increasing interconnection at every level of business. Now, the vast majority of organizations exist in multiple overlapping and interconnected business ecosystems. In the past, only the largest and most powerful players could significantly impact the direction and evolution of a business ecosystem.
Today, all organizations have access to vast amounts of information and resources and can collaborate with new partners.
Scaling Bimodal — Fusing IT With the Business
July 2017
To scale bimodal, CIOs and their teams, in partnership with the business, must create new approaches and capabilities that will involve and touch the whole organization — with business and IT governance front and center. Bimodal is not just scaled agile in application development. The real story is that everyone, not just IT and development, can achieve enterprise agility. When CIOs scale bimodal beyond IT, the way the enterprise thinks and behaves changes — in fact, the entire operating model changes, affecting internal processes across the organization.
Cool Vendors, 2017 — Stand Up to Be Noticed, Stand Out to Lead: A Gartner Trend Insight Report
June 2017
CIOs attempting digital transformation will like many kinds of Cool Vendors. Cool Vendors exist across all major areas of technology innovation. Those that stand out do so because they offer some disruptive capability or opportunity. In the current atmosphere of fast mode, rapid change, CIOs are at a disadvantage in trying to keep up.
IoT Technology Disruptions
June 2017
The Internet of Things (IoT) has seen years of growing interest among enterprises and service providers with the promise of enabling new digital business initiatives and unlocking operational efficiencies. Practically, much of this interest has been rooted in the discovery phase of IoT, where CIOs and CTOs wondered, “What is IoT?” and “Why do I need to care?” Today, as demonstrated in our published research and observed in our client interactions, this has transitioned to the implementation phase, where executives are asking, “How do we get started with IoT?” This shift is largely fueled by the disruptions in IoT technology that have occurred, enabling a feasible and achievable path to creating business value.
Digital Trust: Redefining Trust for the Digital Era
May 2017
A common definition of trust is the belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something. In business, it means someone believes that you made good faith efforts to behave in accordance with any commitments, either explicit or implicit. They believe you to be a reliable partner that will fulfill your commitments in a truthful, ethical manner, safeguard their privacy, and take care to ensure security and safety.
How do you know whether to trust someone? And how can they know to trust you? In a digital business scenario, this becomes exponentially more complicated. The “you” or “someone” can be represented by a large number of algorithms, that “you” or that “someone” doesn’t always directly control. For that reason, trust is essential for a CIO to understand and prioritize, and digital trust has emerged to address the radically changed requirements of agency, scope and spontaneity needed in a volatile digital business world.
Leadership in the Digital Age
May 2017
Digital business changes everything. Organizational structures become fluid and permeable; teams form and disband quickly and continuously; value chains become value networks; customers become partners, competitors, critics, and suppliers; business systems become digital platforms supporting larger ecosystems. In the midst of all this change, CIOs are expected to lead their businesses forward and helping them thrive by spotting the potential of new technology combinations, turning that potential into business opportunities and crafting a new culture to successfully execute on those opportunities.
With so much changing, the role of the CIO must change as well, in many ways and in many different directions at once. This requires determination, commitment, courage and a growth mindset: a learning approach to the role and openness to uncertainties. For those daring, open-minded CIOs, this Special Report is a source of inspiration, ideas and observations to help them hone their capabilities and improve their leadership position in the digital era.
Future of Experience
May 2017
Those involved with CX initiatives are increasingly being asked to think with both their hearts and their heads. That’s to be expected as the field comes of age. Now that leadership and processes are in place, CFOs and finance directors are asking if investing in CX is worth it. They expect a financial return. Project proposals without a financial business case are more likely to be turned down. Nearly half of organizations in a Gartner survey claimed they can track the financial benefits of CX projects, while Gartner’s marketing leaders survey shows that over 80% of organizations expect to compete mainly based on CX, meaning that the skill of realizing benefits will be in high demand.
Supporting Cost Optimization in the Business
March 2017
The greatest opportunities to “optimize” a business are outside the information technology function. CIOs can support cost optimization beyond IT, and drive improved business performance. This Special Report is meant to be a guide to taking a broader view of cost optimization.