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

Ted serves CIOs. He has 24 years of experience in the technology industry, focusing on the effects of disruptive technologies on the workforce and workforce productivity. His research focuses on workforce technologies and the programs that support them, including smartphones, tablets, and their impact on productivity; social business and collaboration tools; cloud email and collaboration tools; and the consumerization of IT.
Ted is the co-author of Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business (Harvard Business Review Press, September 2010). Social, mobile, video, and cloud Internet services give consumers and business customers more information power than ever before. To win customer trust and business, companies must empower their employees to directly engage with and solve the problems of empowered customers using these same technologies.
It is through this empowered lens that the consumerization of IT makes sense: employees solving customer and business problems using readily available technology that they master first at home — social, mobile, video, and cloud. This management book helps CIOs and IT organizations engage directly with business managers and employees to build an empowered strategy: understanding which employees are workforce "HEROes" — highly empowered and resourceful operatives — implementing empowering collaboration and innovation programs, creating a new empowered security architecture, and supporting HEROes with the right technology platforms.
In 2009, Ted launched Forrester's Workforce Technology Assessment, the industry's first benchmark survey of workforce technology adoption. This quantitative approach helps professionals and the teams they work with have a fact-based conversation about employees' technology adoption and requirements.
Prior to joining Forrester in April 1997, Ted was a cofounder of Phios, an MIT spinoff. Before that, Ted worked for eight years as CTO and director of engineering for a software company serving the healthcare industry. Early in his career, Ted was a singer and bass player for Crash Davenport, a successful Maryland-based rock-and-roll band.
Ted has a master's degree in management from the MIT Sloan School of Management. He also holds an M.S. in computer science from the University of Maryland and a B.A. with honors in physics from Swarthmore College.
How To Defuse The Software Asset Management Time Bomb In Your Basement
As large firms place ever more critical reliance on software apps and tools, restructure through mergers and acquisitions, and outsource elements of software development and delivery, they face...
Global Firms Assemble Custom Apps To Support Key Processes
Manufacturers in mature industries such as automotive or more recently aerospace have evolved from making every component to focusing on market requirements and designing and managing "bought in"...
Modernizing The SAP Platform To Prepare For Innovation
Almost half of Forrester clients deploy applications from SAP, investing millions to maintain them as a system of record; many of these companies are global corporations with more than $1 billion in...

New Mountain Capital, the owner of Red Prairie, the demand sensing and supply chain execution software vendor, announced last week that it would fully acquire supply chain planning vendor JDA. The...
Road Map: The Business Applications Playbook
Firms are often torn between forces driving application change or transformation and the overarching desire for cost management. At the same time, they often struggle to deliver projects on time and...

Forrester developed the request for proposal/request for information (RFP/RFI) tool based on past experience and research into the widest range of possible environmental requirements. The tool...

I am trying to gather best practice information on what companies do in support of SAP Basis and where these support people fit into the organization (are they within infrastructure and operations or...
Most Forrester readers certainly understand the importance of empowering their employees to contend with highly informed and increasingly demanding customers. But I’m often asked just how to...
What are the best practices for implementing retail systems — locally, regionally, or globally? What does the future of retail point of sale (POS) look like?
To ensure a solid foundation for implementing more-sophisticated demand management or supply chain functionality, application development and delivery professionals will generally need to assess the...
The world's largest firms face mounting pressure to deliver more timely and transparent financial results that are subject to more exacting standards. As a result, they are increasingly concerned...
Conventional wisdom suggests buying before building software. However, as an increasing proportion of product and service value is digital — think of a naval vessel's operation system (Windows...
Retail is experiencing substantial change because consumers are now empowered by the web with information about price, availability, and merchandise features. The retail industry is still served by...
Henry Ford's 1913 policy of offering consumers cars in any color they liked as long as it was black perfectly illustrates the problem for manufacturers trying to balance consumer service with...
This tool is a self-test to determine how ready a company is to transform its application strategy by moving away from providing cost-effective systems of record and toward driving compelling user...
In order to build a business case for a software asset management program, app development and delivery professionals will generally need to provide stakeholders with an assessment of risk....
In the age of information transparency and short life-cycle merchandise, savvy consumers know more about merchandise characteristics, price and availability comparisons, and product reviews than do...
How To Streamline Retail Pricing Execution
As retailers adopt more-sophisticated price planning tools to contend with more-complex assortments and more merchandise with shorter life cycles, they face practical challenges in executing their...
Firms in the traded goods sector struggle with fragile and complex extended supply chains that often bring over investment in inventory without improving disappointing customer service. Application...