19 July 2006
Forty percent of North American enterprises surveyed by Forrester say that they have already implemented server virtualization; server consolidation and increased flexibility and agility are drivers. Early challenges with obtaining software vendor support for virtualization platforms and friendly software licensing terms will rapidly dissipate, but firms seeking full exploitation will eventually have to make changes to IT practices.
Voice System Personas Are A Must
Specifying a phone self-service system's intended behaviors with a persona helps ensure that interfaces convey appropriate personality traits and support the goals of the intended users. Voice system personas guide interaction design decisions, talent selection, and voice talent coaching. Get input and buy-in from relevant stakeholders and tap brand owners for information.
The Market Outlook For ERP Applications Improves, But Transition Will Be Slow
Companies using ERP software face difficult upgrade decisions and rising ownership costs as vendors promote enhancements to drive support agreement renewals. Technical architecture advancement based on SOA is gaining momentum through the aggressive development efforts of Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP. Other vendors, including Infor Global Solutions and Lawson Software, are making consolidation plays focused on stability rather than innovation. Adoption of next-generation products will be slow; the market will grow 6.3% through 2010 as vendors focus on industry specialization and customer retention ahead of the SOA adoption curve.
Are You Paying Your Vendor's Cost Of Sales?
The information that vendors give to purchasing stakeholders -- IT, lines of business, and executive management -- often requires additional time and effort to translate to a form that allows them to understand it in terms of the business value that the solution should ultimately generate. If you must develop additional explanations, value propositions, and extra messaging in order to approve -- or reject -- a purchase, you're paying your vendor's cost of sales. Forrester has developed a version of its Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) methodology to explicitly align business needs with IT solutions. Using this alignment architecture will save time and effort in arriving at meaningful stakeholder-centric value propositions for IT solutions and services.
Strategies For Combating Online Fraud
The ever-evolving techniques that crooks employ make online fraud and ID theft seem like intractable problems. Financial services firms must provide Internet services safely and securely while assuming that their consumers' computers are compromised. Classic security practices, such as defense-in-depth and risk analysis, point the way to a more far-reaching solution than defending against particular types of attacks like phishing, spyware, or Trojans. Begin by assessing the risks associated with particular activities. Those assessments will allow firms to determine which security measures provide the most effective balance between security and customer convenience for each particular circumstance.
Marketing Technology Adoption 2006 -- Promising, But A Long Way To Go
Marketing technology has reached mainstream adoption. Marketing is now shifting focus from core infrastructure elements -- like the customer data mart and data mining technologies -- to technologies that support optimization of customer interactions and marketing processes. But there is much to do: More than three out of four marketers agree that marketing needs a more comprehensive and integrated application suite to improve its effectiveness, and those vendors that are converging on the vision of a comprehensive marketing suite -- like Aprimo, Oracle (Siebel), and Unica -- are still largely failing to deliver the breadth and depth that marketing requires.
Marketers Want A More Comprehensive Application To Improve Effectiveness
The Future Of Enterprise Software
In this climate, efficient product delivery will be worth as much as technology innovation. Vendors that combine efficient and flexible distribution of IT features to customers with the right new features to support Digital Business Architecture (DBA) and SOA will be the winners. The ecosystems of IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP will span the range of software but will not dominate the universe. Their primary domain will be large enterprises. Only Microsoft will combine this position with strength among midsize enterprises, leaving lots of opportunities for others. Combine IT And Telecom Service Delivery For Greater Business Flexibility The inability of internal IT organizations and external service providers to provide a consolidated view across the different layers of IT and telecom functionality that support business processes has long been a barrier to optimizing operational resources to provide more flexible, coherent, and cost-efficient services. But technical innovations around service management technologies and new standardized processes will result in a new service delivery paradigm that will enable converged end-to-end management globally across these formerly distinct layers. This new paradigm -- which Forrester calls Converged Service Delivery -- will be instrumental in helping business leaders map service efficiencies end to end, based on meaningful business metrics. Continuous IT operations and maintenance consume the lion's share of companies' current IT budgets; our data shows that average spending on operational services has actually increased from 76% in 2005 to 80% of overall IT budgets today. Furthermore, Forrester believes that the 80% budget share is not well spent in many companies. This research note includes a four-phase model for implementation, describing the intermediate practices, such as the IT infrastructure library (ITIL), and technologies, such as configuration management databases (CMDBs), and their sequencing to arrive at fully converged service delivery. Start your planning process by collaborating and communicating closely with other stakeholders on issues such as management, technologies, and road maps. |
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Client Security: A Framework For Protection
Thanks, as always, for reading First Look, and please send me any requests or comments. Merv Adrian Senior Vice President mervadrian@forrester.com Upcoming Forrester Teleconferences Forrester teleconferences are live, interactive, hour-long teleconferences incorporating a simultaneous WebEx slide presentation by a Forrester analyst, followed by an open forum for questions and discussion. The Future Of ERP July 24, 2006, 11 a.m.-12 p.m. Eastern time The Forrester Wave™: Web Conferencing, Q2 2006 July 24, 2006, 1-2 p.m. Eastern time Overcoming Risk And Compliance Myopia July 26, 2006, 1-2 p.m. Eastern time Combating Online Fraud In Financial Services July 27, 2006, 1-2 p.m. Eastern time
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