About Forrester
Forrester Research, Inc. is an independent research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology.

Phil serves Application Development & Delivery Professionals seeking strategies that will help them streamline and manage their application portfolios. Phil's coverage includes application modernization (monitoring, renewing, replacing, or retiring existing applications/platforms); portfolio management (APM) (driving business-aligned modernization via metrics/assessments); rationalization (streamlining the portfolio to reduce lights-on IT costs and increase agility); and strategic planning (aligning business and IT vision and aligning the application/infrastructure to fulfill the joint business/IT vision).
Phil focuses his research on application professionals, but his research also draws the interest of enterprise architects, CIOs, and other IT professionals.
Phil's IT experience dates back to 1982, when he held positions with: the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (consultant); Boston University (application developer); and Cullinet Software, where he held positions as a software developer and consultant before he was promoted to IT director. When CA bought Cullinet in 1989, Phil joined insurance company startup Arbella Mutual Insurance as director of applications, working with a management team to literally create an IT department and implement its initial applications/operating environment. In 1992, Phil accepted a director-level position with the National Council on (workers') Compensation Insurance (NCCI), where he directed a team that developed and distributed a commercial software package, implemented a financial applications package, and rolled out the nation's first Internet-based information service to the worker's compensation industry. Phil held the top management position in NCCI's $26 million Y2K program office — leveraging offshore programming resources to remediate its applications and onsite staff to execute Y2K testing, effectively creating a round-the-clock remediation process.
Phil joined Giga Information Group in 1997 as an industry analyst, covering the Y2K phenomenon, and he was promoted to the position of managing director of research for its e-practices group. Since Forrester bought Giga in 2003, Phil has been bringing his broad technical and managerial experience to bear on application and IT management topics that concern Forrester's diverse client base.
Dell made two bold moves last week that bolster its apps modernization street cred. Since MAKE Technologies and Clerity Solutions may not be household names to you, here are our...
Following on the earlier seeds planted by Champions Of Change: The App Dev & Delivery Role In 2020 and Your Apps Portfolio In 2020: How Do You Get There From Here? imagine you have the opportunity...
Sorry folks but as a Murphy, I just can't resist the temptation - Irish rockers "The Dropkick Murphys" sing a song called "Shipping Up To Boston" - and that is exactly what I and my...
In Champions Of Change: The App Dev & Delivery Role In 2020, we began to think about the business climate in the year 2020 and how it affects the application development and delivery role....
Can you remember what life was like 10 years ago? How were your personal life and professional life different than they are today? Here are a few reminders about life in 2001: ...
The term application portfolio management (APM) has been around for a while now, and I'd like to solicit some opinions and discussion about it. What is your level of interest in...
What is the definition of an "application"? We are "applications development and delivery professionals" - surely we have this question nailed, don't we? The question keeps coming up in...
In his report on the top technology trends to watch in 2011 to 2013, my colleague Gene Leganza called out application portfolio management (APM) as one of a number of "planning and analysis tools to...
A quick note on a big announcement today by IBM that is being rolled out as I write this. No, I don't have a crystal ball - my colleague Brad Day and I spent a day in Poughkeepsie in...
Applications development people can't stand the Luddites in the operations group, and ops people hate those prima donas in apps dev - at least that's what we are led to believe. To...
So you need to formulate an application modernization decision -- what to do with a given application -- how do you begin that decision making process? In the past, modernization decisions were...
In a conversation with a vendor in the application portfolio management space the other day, we got on the subject of what "Cloud" means to them and by extension to their current and future customer...
How successful is your firm at attracting and retaining people with the skills you need to develop, deploy, and maintain your applications? Do you believe we're headed for much tougher times...
OK, so the holidays are over, you've either closed, or are in the process of closing out 2009 year-end processing. The 2010 decade has begun, and it promises momentous change before we see...
OK, so I used a tongue-in-cheek title to attract your attention, forgive me. A recent blog about the Boomer retirement phenomenon provoked some comments by a colleague with strong opinions about...
The rock-band R.E.M. sang a song about the "end of the world as we know it" and to hear some people talk - the end is near! The Chicken-littles of the world would have us believe...
I've written a lot of research around the topic of application portfolio management (APM), and how the tools are slowly maturing from their application mining roots. Although the process of APM...
I had an interesting inquiry with a client that began with this question - "What is the defniition of a legacy application?" Yikes, I thought - this will be one of those...
There is a lot of noise lately from 2 camps - one swears that the availability of people with mainframe skills is drying up rapidly - they either forecast dire shortages, or note...
Once apon a time ... the definition of an application was easy - firms built accounts payable, general ledger, purchasing, order entry, and other applications to meet the...
I heard an interesting comment from an executive at one of the big services firms - that application portfolio management (APM) efforts must begin by mapping business processes for the...