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.
How The Top 10 Providers Stack Up In A Newly Divided Market
Demand for business agility fuels adoption of Agile development techniques that can deliver differentiating business technology (BT) solutions within accelerated time frames. Agile development...

Skills And Staffing: The Agile And Lean Playbook
This report outlines the skills and staffing part of Forrester's solution for application development and delivery (AD&D) executives working on Agile and Lean. It is designed to help AD&D execs act...
Three Cases Show The Path To App Delivery's High-Value Career Choices
How application development and delivery professionals serve the business is changing, calling for new delivery methods, organizational models, roles, and processes. The change: App delivery pros...
Application Assessments Are Only A First Step Toward Rationalization
Application rationalization is a hot topic for many applications professionals and also draws the attention of enterprise architects and CIOs. Most organizations begin by compiling an inventory of...

Managers at all levels of application development and delivery struggle to retain talented applications professionals amidst tight budgets, burgeoning workloads, and a host of other challenges. A...
We are being crushed by our IT legacy and must deal with the problem now. Bloated application portfolios prevent us from fully supporting new business opportunities and innovation; IT decision-makers...

Packaged applications, custom-built applications, shrink-wrapped applications, and system software all share a common trait: Mergers, acquisitions, and the passage of time have allowed redundancy and...
Applications professionals struggle to explain the cost of their applications' ongoing operations and maintenance to their business counterparts, who commonly perceive the costs as excessive. The...
The size and composition of the global workforce is changing, and the changes will affect IT professionals and business leaders in diverse ways. Population experts debate generational differences in...
Common Qualities Apply To All Types Of Portfolio Management Tools
The term "portfolio management" is officially in vogue — it has been appended to applications, projects and programs, enterprises, and to IT itself. But what does it mean to manage a portfolio?...

Wary business executives are squeezed by external competition for market share and internal competition for operating and IT budgets. Applications professionals can no longer expect that the...
Economic instability around the globe is forcing organizations to react: Some organizations will have to cut costs to survive, some organizations will proceed as usual, while still others will take a...
Once developers have implemented and stabilized applications in a production environment, the applications are placed in "maintenance mode"; thereafter, many receive little scrutiny. As time passes,...
The technology needs of an industry evolve and mature unevenly — in the early years, companies replace technology frequently to scale in step with organic growth. As the industry matures, it...
What To Cut And What Not To Cut When The Budget Ax Must Fall
CIOs have faced lean economic times with regularity over the past four decades, and they will inevitably face lean times again — it isn't a question of whether they will happen but when....
Proactive CIOs Will Help Firms Amid Economic Uncertainties
Macroeconomic conditions, whether they are downturns or boom times, broadly shape the CIO's job, but the firm's own context drives action. The reality is that any business at any time may need to...
CIOs who question whether a lack of younger workers with mainframe skills will influence their hardware platform choices are asking the wrong question. At issue isn't the viability of the zSeries...
Align IT Execution To Business Needs With Vision, Context, And Orchestration
The duties performed by CIOs are analogous to those of big-city mayors — neither executive has the chance to build a community from scratch, and most inherit a series of problems from...
The business leaders in one bank regularly plan business strategy several years into the future. During these sessions, leaders pose forward-looking questions: "How much will our business change...
The impetus for streamlining application portfolios can originate from many different directions and catalysts. In this case it was simple: The bank's board of directors mandated that IT management...
Small IT shops can assess and manage the skills and proficiencies of their staff "by feel" — large IT organizations must have a framework and process to do this. The New York State CIO Council...
How CIOs Should Measure IT Maintenance And Ongoing Operations
How does a CIO judge whether he or she is using IT resources in the most effective and efficient manner? If the CIO is successful, how does he or she demonstrate this to the CEO and senior...
While hiring the right people has always been a key capability of successful organizations, shifting demographics are driving skills management to become one of today's critical issues. Skills...
Forrester's Reference Guide For Effective Management Of Legacy Applications
As an industry, IT tends to dismiss rather than reuse previous technology genres and, as a result, has spent vast sums to rip and replace technology for technology's sake, often at the expense of...
Baby Boomer Retirement Sets Stage For A "Perfect Storm"
The Baby Boomer retirement phenomenon will drive the legacy skills issue in IT to new heights. IT organizations that have yet to determine their exposure to the combined threat are playing with fire....