Forrester News & Articles

February and we just can’t seem to get away from the dual obsessions of hosted solutions and security. Particularly telling in the SMB sector, it looks like these are two areas we are going to be hearing a lot about over the course of the year.

In the world of Document Management two of the hottest topics are cloud computing and security. Interestingly, however, it seems that according to a report from Forrester we're not taking to cloud storage at all, and we also discovered that data security is increasingly troublesome. Could it be that there's a link between the two?

We continue our weekly SMB Tech Rollup this time with the news that many SMBs are getting worried about IT security, but are happily embracing the cloud.

In addition, Microsoft and Intuit are getting together in the cloud, HP and Cisco could be helping SMBs with new pricing arrangements, and Spigit is focusing on better collaboration tools.

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

• ICQ Launches New Client With Real time Features
• Study: Social Networks Not Keeping Students Up At Night
• Majority Of Internet Users Use Social Media
• Internet Explorer Declared Unsafe By Germany, France

There's no sign of enterprise content management investment decreasing in the coming year. At least not according to new Forrester (news, site) research.

Your website has become a critical component of how you interact with customers. However, in most cases its use and the team that manages it have both grown organically. Additionally, it's often the IT department running the show.

As a result of this pattern, many websites do not meet the customer experience bar that modern marketing requires. They are not usable enough. They are not accessible enough. And they are not persuasive enough. There are also too many bits and pieces stapled together to create the feedback loops.

On the Ground: A Growing Problem

Recent Forrester research data found that improving customer experience via the website was at the top of many organizations' priority list. Other hot items included improving online usability (important for 78% of respondents), improving support for the brand online (64%) and improving cross-channel interactions (58%).

The problem, according to Forrester, is that the gap has grown too large between the business people who want these things and the technical and organizational realities on the ground.

In Demand: Better Powers of Persuasion

There are a number of elements that go into creating the optimal customer experience including rich media, social media and community, and analytics. But it's not as simple as finding a single vendor to support all your needs -- in fact, there is no single vendor.

With the number of Web CMS vendors, marketing vendors and new breed experience management vendors offering solutions to help you meet your challenges, it's hard to know which way to run.

Forrester and Siteworx are in turn analyzing and tackling the problem. You can join the conversation this Thursday, Dec 10th at 1pm EST. During a 1 hour webinar they will look specifically at how -- given the lack of a single vendor solution -- you can bridge the customer experience gap. 

During the free event analyst Stephen Powers will cover:

• The components of an ideal customer experience
• Tools to uncover how your content is being consumed
• The various vendors in the interactive marketing landscape
• Steps to develop your own persuasive content strategy
• Technology convergence patterns

Sound intriguing? You can register here.

Demand for document management and record management software is set to grow by over 7% every year for the next five years in the Asia/Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) region, according to new research by IT market research company IDC (news, site).

Ron Rogowski and his team of researchers at Forrester Research, look at what they call emotional experience design and how it affects the way it can create online experiences that “deeply engage customers” in a new report called Emotional Experience Design,

We always look to the analysts to help us narrow down our selection of vendors for things like enterprise content management. We recently had a look at Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management. Now we look to Forrester (news, site), who has released their Q4 Wave for Enterprise Content Management Suites.

Probably one of the most interesting interviews you could have is with Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, on the topic of SharePoint (news, site). Oh to be a fly on the wall in that interview room -- a fly that could also ask questions, mind you.

Forrester analyst Matthew Brown had that opportunity after Ballmer's keynote at SharePoint Conference 2009. Here are a few of the things that Ballmer said that caught our attention.

Early last month IBM (news, site) began the process of articulating its Smart Archive Strategy. Began, we say, because at the time of the announcement the company released IBM Information Archive, a disk-and-tape information infrastructure solution that offered a "unified storage” approach to archiving company information.

But they weren’t finished with that and only recently unveiled a number of other solutions that are designed to provide analytics and data discovery to companies looking to determine what information they should keep and what information they should bin.

Forrester (news, site) recently asked how much of what you know about your business ecosystem comes from controlled, structured sources like surveys, product registration forms, customer interviews and market reports? If the answer is "just about everything," then you're leaving a huge amount of data on the table and then tossing it in the trash.

This data is in the form of unstructured content in social media, email, call center notes, help desk tickets, news articles, patent applications, contracts and more. The problem is that even if you want to take all of this data seriously, it's impractical to hire enough people to sort through and classify it.
 

Confirming the recent Forrester Report that showed a widespread lack of management of electronic records, AIIM (news, site) has just published a similar report that shows 26% of organizations admitting that they have no electronic records management policy.

The report also shows that nearly half of companies surveyed (44%) have no procedures for freezing electronic records in the event of litigation or compliance issues.

The latest report from Forrester Research (news, site) would seem to suggest that companies are slowly coming around to the fact that it's bad business to put investment in records management on the back burner.

While there is a recognition that records management is a core business process in any company, only 20 per cent of companies would be “very confident” that they could meet eDiscovery or compliance requests if they were asked to do so in the morning.

However, the good news is that by the end of 2010 more than half of those surveyed in the 14-page report, entitled Records Management: User Expectations, Market Trends, And Obstacles written by Brian W.Hill of Forrester with Matthew Brown, Peter Schmidt, say they will be expanding their technology deployments in this regard.

When IBM (news, site) announced that they had come to an agreement on the terms of a deal that would see IBM buy out predictive analytics company SPSS for US$ 1.2 billion, some commentators suggested that there was still time for a competing bid.

However, at the close of business last Friday, SPSS announced that it had called a special meeting of shareholders for October 2, for what will be a definitive vote on the US$ 50 a share deal.