By Matthew Brown, VP & Practice Leader serving CIOs, Forrester

Forrester is a global research and advisory firm serving professionals in 17 key roles across distinct client segments. Matthew Brown is the Vice President and practice leader serving CIOs and IT leadership teams for Forrester. With more than 18 years of professional experience in enterprise IT, interactive marketing, and technology markets, Matthew advises clients in a wide variety of industries around the globe on IT's role in innovation, IT organization, strategic planning, and workplace technologies.Using an interaction with one of his clients he explains how new sources of revenue can be obtained using IT.

Every once in a while I get the opportunity to completely immerse myself in one of my client's problems. This time, it was at an IT strategy offsite where a senior director of IT asked me one simple question: "How can we use information technology to help our company open up new streams of revenue?" I found the question refreshing, mainly because nine out of ten CIOs I talk to these days ask the opposite: "how can IT reduce costs?"

Fortunately for me, this client had invited lots of smart people from business and IT and outside experts into the room for two days to explore the revenue question. Challenges familiar to most life sciences companies got folks in the room in the first place: patent expiration foretold eroding profit margins for their blockbuster drugs, and expansion into emerging markets was an avenue for growth, yet one fraught with complexity and uncertain returns.

So this group's charter was to think digital

Taking inspiration from morning TED talks, four working teams presented ideas for revenue opportunities created by emerging technologies in tech markets like mobile, big data, security, and consumer experiences. The teams cited creative ideas — like algorithms that use public data sources to reduce production forecast variance and improve distribution allocations; modern IT security models, pioneered in financial services, that would enable them to cut the time it takes to on-ramp a new manufacturing partner from months to weeks; company-owned data that could be sold or licensed and made available through public APIs to third parties; and many more.