This has been an extraordinary year for technology leaders, with a chaotic storm of technology change and global market volatility. I’ve been fortunate enough to travel around the world and speak to technology leaders in a variety of regions about the challenges they are facing. For example, last month I was in Sydney at Forrester’s Technology & Innovation Summit APAC and delivered a keynote on defining IT’s role in this new era which spurred a number of rich conversations with event attendees, partners, and clients in that region. And while there are certainly some region-specific challenges and nuances to contend with, I have identified four broader challenges which are converging this year to put more pressure on technology organizations and leaders: artificial intelligence, graph-based data management, IT management, and technical debt.
Next month, at Forrester’s Technology And Innovation Summit EMEA in London, I’ll present a keynote that incorporates what I’ve been hearing and aligns these challenges in a unified and seamless story. For decades, IT has struggled with some persistent challenges. I’m talking about things like security, visibility, responsiveness, resilience, and perhaps most of all, technical debt — the ongoing decay and entropy of our systems. Today, as more new AI-driven technology enters the fray we face even more risk of redundancy, sprawl, and critical systems that no longer meet business needs but cannot simply be ripped and replaced. These are wicked problems. Yet I believe we are starting to see real progress in how we understand and manage them with some specific tools rising to help.
Long Live Graphs
Perhaps not surprisingly, AI is both part of the challenge and part of the solution. For starters, you have to remember that AI today is far more than just the large language models we all hear so much about. It also includes:
- retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
- vector databases
- graph databases
- AI agents, which are the orchestration of all these ingredients into purposeful, goal-directed capabilities.
But the graph, in particular, is really fascinating to me. Since publishing my blog The Graphical Future of IT Management earlier this year (my most-read post as a Forrester analyst), I’ve continued to reflect on its promise and discuss it with Forrester clients and colleagues. We’re now seeing IT management vendors — ServiceNow, Atlassian, Dynatrace, Datadog, Planview, and others — doubling down on managing, representing, and analyzing information as interconnected graphs. Increasingly, these vendors are also stitching their data together, forming what I believe is a powerful new substrate: a unified IT knowledge graph. This may be the true successor to the long-troubled configuration management database (CMDB).
To put it plainly: CMDB is dead. Long live the IT knowledge graph.
Seven Domains Of The IT Knowledge Graph
Within this knowledge graph, we see seven critical domains converging to create a unified and interconnected framework. Each domain represents a vital aspect of modern organizational operations, and their integration unlocks new levels of efficiency, insight, and decision-making power. These domains include:
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Systems of work
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User experience
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IT operations & AIOps
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Core portfolio data
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Information security
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IT finance
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Data and knowledge representation itself
These domains are becoming more coherent and interconnected. But the real question is: why connect them? Because integrated data creates real, actionable value. What kind of value? Well, earlier in this blog I talked about the growing tech debt challenge. I believe the first major proof point for graphs will come in the form of technical debt modeling — simulating technical debt, analyzing doom loops, and providing clear and reliable guidance to help organizations break out of destructive cycles before they compound into technical bankruptcy.
Looking Ahead
These are exciting times. The convergence of AI, graph data, and IT management gives us tools to address long-standing challenges in ways that were impossible just a few years ago. If you really want to dig into this, I hope you can join me at Forrester’s upcoming Technology & Innovation Summits in London October 8-10 and in Austin November 2-5, where you’ll get exposed to the latest leading-edge IT research from across our analyst teams on all of these topic.
