September 2007
American essayist Henry David Thoreau once said that he would "give all the wealth of the world, and all the deeds of all the heroes, for one true vision." It's a sentiment anyone in business can relate to—and CIOs perhaps more than most. Given the power of new technologies to transform industries and create entirely new businesses and the often staggering cost of responding to successive waves of technological change, "one true vision" of emerging technology would be extraordinarily valuable.
Kishore Swaminathan is in the vision business. In his role as Accenture's chief scientist, one of his most important responsibilities is to anticipate the future of technology over the next three to five years and to help align the company's technology investments across a wide range of activities, from R&D to the development of new client services to training. He also pens Outlook's technology column, "On the Edge."
"Having a vision of technology," he notes, "helps an organization create a coherent technology strategy as opposed to a piecemeal reaction to individual technology developments." Armed with such a vision, Swaminathan adds, Accenture can "provide our clients with a credible, product-neutral perspective on technology so that they can prioritize their own investments."
A graduate of the elite Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, where he studied aeronautical engineering, Swaminathan went on to earn his master's degree and PhD in computer science from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In 1990, he joined Accenture Technology Labs in Chicago. Since then, he has worked on more than a dozen research projects—in areas including computer-assisted collaboration, sensor networks, data and process analytics, system architecture and software development—and has as many patents to his credit. In 2000, one of his projects in corporate knowledge manage-ment received the Computerworld Smithsonian Award for the best application of IT.
Accenture's latest technology vision is the product of a formal and rigorous forecasting methodology developed by Swaminathan and his team; the process involves extensive microanalysis of scientific data and macroanalysis of technology and trends. Hypotheses are shared with technology experts throughout Accenture (Web 2.0 wikis were used for the first time this year), who help validate and prioritize the resulting predictions. The current vision represents more than 2,000 man-hours of analysis and input from more than 700 technology executives across 20 different countries.
Why such an elaborate process? "A technology vision that can guide business decisions," says Swaminathan, "must balance three complementary forces: the eternal optimism of technologists who imagine the possibilities, the down-to-earth pragmatism of practitioners who understand the inherent perils of emerging technologies, and the dispassionate rigor of research and analysis. With the help of wikis and Web 2.0, our methodology tries to achieve this balance."
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