Forrester News & Articles

Contrary to popular belief, customer experience isn’t a destination, but rather a journey. While every company must follow its own path to meet the specific needs of their customers, there are common stages that it will travel through on their way to success.

It’s no secret that I am a fan of the era of the empowered employee. Ever since I was introduced to the concept in 2010 at a Forrester conference, I’ve supported the notion that the groundswell of employee innovation was an important milestone and an imperative part of social business, now and as it evolves. So when a copy of Forrester’s new report, To Thrive in the Empowered Era You’ll Need Software, Software Everywhere, landed in my inbox, I was excited to read through it.

Customer experience management (CXM) begins with customer data. Ultimately, it also ends there. While CXM can gather insights from consumer data garnered around individual behaviors online, if the consumer is not prepared to provide certain data voluntarily, the picture is incomplete. A recent report by Forrester shows that acquiring that data is increasingly problematic.

All of the changes taking place in the business intelligence space make it difficult to pinpoint exactly where it is going. Forrester recently looked into the question and found that the relationship between users of business intelligence applications and the IT departments that are providing business intelligence tools is being turned upside down.

Forrester CEO George Colony turned a lot of heads at this year’s Le Web conference in Paris with his talk about the so-called death of the Web. Reminiscent of a popular Wired magazine cover story from 2010 ("The Web is Dead. Long Live the Internet."), Colony’s predictions buttress an app-centric strategy, rendering the network/browser model obsolete. But wait-- before you spend money on flowers, let’s put away the mortality talk and examine what’s really going on here.  

It’s no secret that in the past year, the words “customer experience” and “customer engagement” have become more prominent. As companies become better acquainted with their customers, their goals and expectations, the better they can tailor the way they deliver information, develop products and otherwise engage with their users.

This week, the DAM Lowdown rounds up takeaways from the Digital Asset Management Conference Europe, a new solution for video and audio searches, Forrester's list of best practices, Razuna 1.4.7, Nuxeo World videos, choosing a DAM solution and a podcast interview with a DAM expert.

Forrester has released a new report that defines best practices for digital asset management (DAM). Surprisingly, Forrester was able to distill the behavior down to three practices. Before you get too excited at your chance to become a DAM expert in three easy steps, you might want to read this article.

Several articles have recently proclaimed the intranet is dead. In an age of activity streams, mobile communications and other forms of fast-moving dialogue, do intranets remain relevant? Analyst firm Forrester Research has released a new report, Intranet Portals: Workforce Technology Adoption 2011, that provides some insight into that question.

When I saw the headline of the Forrester article proclaiming the death of the enterprise CMS suite, I couldn't help but both be pleased with myself, and feel a little sorry for the analysts. After all, I scooped them and proclaimed the exact same thing a little more than three weeks before.

Are we close to seeing a social revolution in business? Considering how companies like Salesforce.com, Oracle and IBM have been shoving their respective tools into the ring, one would think so, but a few big companies on a bandwagon doesn’t necessarily mean transformation is near. In a recent survey from Forrester, TJ Keitt reveals some interesting statistics that indicate only a small percentage of people understand and take advantage of the social phenomenon. 

Welcome to November. This month we are taking a closer look at how cloud technology and practices are shifting information management and customer experience operations. To start, we looked at cloud content management and how old school vendors, like EMC, are offering on-demand solutions.

In related news, Forrester ranked the current enterprise content management (ECM) vendors, telling us the ECM suite is dead. While many of these vendors have a cloud-story to tell, there is still a ways to go before we see full-fledged offerings from everyone.

And, in a recent Information Security study, more than 54% of respondents think that the cloud (SaaS, IaaS or PaaS) has increased security, but concerns linger.

Most Popular

• The Art Of SharePoint Success: Governance -- How to Do It
• Not Sitting at the Grown-Ups Table: The Problem with Records Management
• Forrester Wave Q4 2011: Bye-Bye Enterprise CMS Suites, Content-Centric Apps Are King
• 6 Concepts for the Future of Website Governance, Including a New Functional Model
• EMC, Microsoft, OpenText Among Gartner Enterprise CMS Magic Quadrant Leaders

Editor's Picks

• [INFOGRAPHIC] The Decline of Outbound Marketing
• Alert: What's Coming for Open Source CMS in November 2011
• Publishing for Tablets: Flavors of Hybrids
• The Cloud: No Panacea for Enterprise Content Management...Yet
• EMC Modernizes the Documentum User Experience

Around the Web

• The Muppets and Content Marketing: 3 Things You May Be Missing
  
• Agile Software is a Cop-out; Here's What's Next
• What Your Social Media Dashboard Should Look Like
• A Review of the New Gmail (Look & Features)
• Wholistic Integration is Primarily About Strategy 

Featured Events (all events | post your event)

• Nov 08 -- Sentiment Analysis Symposium in San Francisco
• Nov 09 -- IDC Webinar: How to Future Proof your Web Content Management System
• Nov 10 -- Marketing Analytics Conference Boston
• Nov 14 -- DAM LA 2011 Conference
• Nov 14 -- Enterprise 2.0 Conference Santa Clara 2011

Featured Jobs (all jobs | post your job)

• Documentum Web Content Management Administrator in Houston at Perficient
• Software Engineer/Web Technologies in Long Beach at Laserfiche
• Social Media Manager in California at OmniUpdate
• Business Development Executive in Atlanta at Bridgeline Digital
• Project Manager in Richmond at Ektron

Yesterday we saw in the Forrester Wave for Enterprise CMS Suites 2011 for Q4 that there is a shift in the enterprise CMS market away from the big, lumbering giants of a couple of years ago toward more content-centric apps designed to fulfill a specific business function. Today, we’ll take a look at how some of the major vendors are dealing with this challenge.

Discussion around the evolving role of enterprise CMS and the software that aims to do that are almost a weekly phenomenon. This week’s discussion comes in the shape of the Forrester Wave for ECM Suites for Q4, which highlights a number of issues that we already saw in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for enterprise CMS last week.

The enterprise has empowerment issues. First it was their customers; then it was their employees. The consumerization of IT has overwhelmed organizations. For a while it was manageable to deny their technology requests. By now, most companies have come to realize that employees and customers will continue to empower themselves and they can’t exert as much control as they want. To help them best prepare for the empowered road ahead, Forrester has analyzed the highest-impact empowered employee technologies by evaluating their maturity and business value.