About Forrester
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Shar serves Marketing Leadership professionals. She is a leading expert on how businesses can leverage interactive marketing channels and technologies to drive sales and deepen customer relationships. During her 12 years with Forrester, Shar has been instrumental in the development of many of the company's interactive marketing program evaluation methodologies, training courses, and marketing planning tools and has also been part of Forrester's sales and consulting organizations.
Shar's research focuses on overall interactive marketing strategies; crafting efficient, effective interactive programs; organizing for interactive marketing; and integrating interactive channels into the rest of the marketing mix. Specific subjects addressed in Shar's research include email marketing, online advertising, search engine marketing, ad serving and targeting, interactive budgeting and forecasts, and interactive marketing organizational models.
Shar returned to Forrester in 2004 after several years away working in marketing consulting. Shar served as research director for marketing research boutique, TideWatch, where she led internal strategy efforts and client strategy projects. Shar was also a consultant with Carlson Marketing Group's Business Strategy Consulting team, developing CRM and email programs for clients including British Airways, Buena Vista Home Entertainment, and Home Depot. Shar began her career at Forrester in 1997 during the early days of the Internet and has written research on customer loyalty, ad networks, and marketing measurement and planning.
A popular speaker, Shar has been seen on stage at ad:tech, MITX, DMA, and the Email Service Provider Coalition events, among others. She is on the board of SEMPO — the search engine marketing professionals organization — and is also widely quoted in the press including such media outlets as BusinessWeek, Fortune, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal and is a frequent guest on CNBC and National Public Radio.
Shar is a graduate of Harvard University.
Design Around User Roles, Not Application Silos
In the siloed application mindset of 20th-century solution models, a key design question is, "How should we build the user interface (UI) for this application?" By contrast, the appropriate design...
Developing a cohesive information strategy that can deliver on current and future business needs is challenging. Building an information architecture is a highly collaborative endeavor, and to...
Part 3 Of A Three-Part Series On Why Key IT Roles Fail
Certain roles in IT can significantly change the organization for good or bad. Through a combination of surveys, interviews, and consulting engagements, we gathered in-depth information on the common...

I am trying to develop a solid vision statement for our business architecture (BA) organization that is supported by our mission. The vision statement represents the future, is result-oriented, and...
Enterprise architecture (EA) continues to gain recognition as a key practice for maximizing the impact of business' use of technology. An effective EA practice can eliminate business-IT alignment...
Five Pragmatic Practices To Improve EA Value Throughout The M&A Process
A new wave of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) is happening, and contrary to previous M&A periods in which IT was only tactically involved, organizations now draw IT into their plans for cost savings...
Profile Of An InfoWorld/Forrester Enterprise Architecture Award Winner
Enterprise architecture (EA) organizations often toil out of the limelight — helping their firms improve business-IT alignment, rationalize their application portfolio, and guide their use of...
Can you please send some key requirements, skills, areas of focus, and areas of demonstrated expertise for an SOA architect?
Future Look: The EA Practice Playbook
This report outlines the future look of Forrester's solution for enterprise architecture (EA) professionals building a high-performance EA practice. It will help you understand the future of EA in...

For the thousands of foreign companies that establish business operations in China every year, one of the first things on their to-do lists is setting up IT infrastructure, including horizontal and...

In an attempt to control IT costs, the US federal government is establishing mandates that are forcing deep and massive technology change. With data center consolidation and cloud migrations entering...

As CIOs strive to evolve IT from a Solid Utility or Trusted Supplier to a fully integrated business partner, they need the ability to describe IT functions in business terms. While IT has long sought...
Business Goals: The BT Strategic Planning Playbook
Clear business goals lie at the heart of good strategy. Unfortunately, many organizations have aspirational goals that make strategic planning difficult at best, and they lack the mechanism to...

Performance Management: The EA Practice Playbook
This report outlines the performance management section of Forrester's solution for enterprise architecture (EA) professionals building a high-performance EA practice. We designed this report to help...

The inability to find content, a lack of compliance, and poor customer experiences all add up to real costs. If you care about getting the right information to the right people at the right time and...
Road maps have proven to be enterprise architects' most effective communication and planning artifacts. They are summarized planning documents with an implementation timeline, enabling the analysis...
The BT Governance Collection: Stakeholders And Structures
Enterprise governance is about decision rights: who has input into decisions, who makes them, how are outcomes measured, and who is held accountable for those outcomes. Business technology (BT)...
Strategic Plan: The EA Method Playbook
This report describes the strategic plan of Forrester's EA method playbook — our set of high-value practices that enterprise architects should use to help their organizations plan, architect,...
The Foundation For Data Governance, Tooling, And More
Metadata management is the foundation for data governance, management, and use. But despite this, firms have a spotty record of collecting, harmonizing, and managing the metadata inherent in their...
Design patterns, proven technology stacks, and well-documented application infrastructure are fundamental tools for promoting common practices in the design of business solutions. Enterprises create...