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 organizations 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 organization 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.

The four guides for determining a trend's relevance

The research of past trends helps to find patterns that can help us better understand how to evaluate them in terms of their relevance to a business. There are many reasons why attempts to turn a promising trend into a profitable one for any given business may fail—insufficient talent or leadership nonalignment come to mind. The study found that trends that add value have inherent attributes that make them particularly valuable to any business. Here are as following:

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

1. Disruptive business value

Almost any trend or development has the potential to improve something in an organization. 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.

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. 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 organization 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.

"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.

Adopt or not: making decision

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. CIOs should consider four possible engagement approaches:

• First mover: This engagement makes the most sense in the case where the trend has significant impact on the company's core business model (which is to say, it's a matter of business survival). This approach generally involves investing significant resources of time, people, and money. The big trap here is convincing yourself that the first-mover approach is the only viable option.
• Fast follower: This approach is best applied when the trend could have an important impact on your business model or open up a significant revenue stream. This engagement posture can work when the trend is still too early in its maturity cycle to understand how it can best be harnessed, or when the business doesn't yet have sufficient capabilities in place to act on the trend. A good signal of a trend's importance is when big players lead the innovation and go all in. The danger here is taking a "wait and see" approach too long and finding yourself much further behind your competitors than you expected.
• Slow adopter: This approach is an acceptable option when the trend isn't directly relevant to the core business or is not mature. It might make sense for niche applications of a trend. The danger here is that complacency and an overly narrow view of the trend's relevance, such as focusing only on how existing competitors might use it and failing to consider emerging players, leave your company too far behind to catch up.
• Non-partaker: Some trends just don't make sense for a business to adopt. This is often an unpopular approach when the board or senior management is demanding action. A clear view of business goals and the impact of a trend on those goals is critical. But complacency is also a danger here when legacy-driven thinking argues that a given trend "doesn't apply to us.

The call on whether and how to adopt a trend is not a one-time decision. It requires continual review as technology matures and evolves, new implementation models and supporting services scale, or the market situation shifts. But CIOs who use the four parameters as a compass to determine relevance and think through their engagement options can better guide their organizations toward turning trends into value.