Forrester News & Articles

It has been clear for some time that the market for software applications has been changing. "Agile" has become a buzz word in the apps world, with everyone talking about it, a few delivering and many more depending on their tried and tested on-premises apps.

This week, we look at the Q2 2012 Forrester Wave Digital Asset Management for Customer Experience report, what went down at the Henry Stewart DAM event in New York, a partnership between ADAM Software and ConceptShare, how to measure maturity in the young DAM marketplace and a new white paper from Widen.

As the digital asset management (DAM) market evolves, DAM is shifting from a poorly-defined, siloed application to an integrated customer experience management (CXM) tool with four distinct use cases. In its Q2 2012 Forrester Wave Digital Asset Management for Customer Experience report, Forrester Research details the current state of the still-maturing DAM marketplace.

Big data is forcing marketers to evolve, but big vendors in the key interactive marketing space are still leading the way, according to the new Forrester Wave: Interactive Attribution Vendors , Q2 2012 report.

If you’re not entirely sure that your company has developed the correct Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategy or technologies, you would not be alone. According to recent research from Forrester, despite widespread adoption and deployment, many IT and business people says they are struggling.

With SharePoint firmly established in the enterprise, and companies looking to deploy an enterprise content management system across the company, many businesses are being forced to answer the question as to whether they should replace their enterprise CMS with SharePoint, or integrate the two.

Enterprise content management looks set to make a comeback this year. While most of the curtain calls over the past year have been in the mobile and social media space and enterprise content management has been neglected in many enterprises, new research from Forrester suggests that companies will be investing again in ECM in the coming year.

Just as Forrester predicts that, by 2020, we’ll be living in a world dominating by smart devices, it also suggests that, in just 4 years, there will be a chief mobility officer overseeing enterprise mobile strategies.

 We all know about the importance of the customer experience, but because there's no magic formula for what works and what doesn’t, it’s often challenging to know how your company’s efforts stack up against the competition. Until now. Forrester recently announced the results of their 2012 Customer Experience Index.

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.