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.
My colleague Julie Ask has just published an important report, "The Future Of Mobile Is User Context," introducing how companies will use the new intelligence and capabilities of smartphones to...
You can use Internet protocols to make phone calls inside your own network. And you don't have to pay for the minutes. But you can't do the same thing with a business partner. Instead, you...
This post is to announce and describe the 2011 Groundswell Awards, specifically the internal "management" category: innovation, collaboration (including social), and mobile. As my Empowered coauthor,...
That call may surprise you. You might have put storage or Gigabit ethernet or the Internet itself at the top of the list. But when I think about what's different in the life of your average...
As my colleague Sarah Rotman Epps so aptly observes: the third generation of iPad is a gut renovation masquerading as incremental innovation. The new iPad looks basically the same but now carries a...
My colleague Gene Leganza has pulled off a consumerization coup for enterprise architects (EAs) and those who work with them. EAs must wrestle with the best way to harness the innovation of HEROes --...
Your workforce is mobile and loving it. They love it because they can get things done anywhere, anytime, on any device. You can almost see happy tails wagging as they check their email. But they...
This case study is from TJ Keitt's and my social business playbook report, “The Road To Social Business Starts With A Burning Platform.” A social business uses technology to...
by Ted Schadler Our last post on Gen X using Web 2.0 at work generated a lot of buzz in other blog posts, particularly at ReadWriteWeb. One of the biggest comments had to do with how generations are...
by Ted Schadler Since colleague Chris Voce and I published a pair of reports on corporate email in the cloud (one on the infrastructure and operations and one on the cost of running email...
by Ted Schadler It wasn't a surprise to see networking expansionist Cisco buying Flip, the popular video camcorder (though the price tag was steep especially given Cisco's recent stock...
by Ted Schadler I had the chance to join 50 other people at a telepresence event last week. This one took place in real-time using Cisco's TelePresence rooms. (Okay, full...
Google just bought QuickOffice. I think that means they now get the App Internet and are moving beyond pure Web. The App Internet is the future of software architecture and the foundation of how...
In our research and in our work with clients on their mobile intiatives, one problem comes up again and again: the very people the app is designed for don't know what it does or why they should...
by Ted Schadler Symantec today announced its acquisition of MessageLabs, a 520-person UK-based email filtering and security vendor. Given the cost and hassles that information & knowledge management...
I spend a lot of time delivering PowerPoint presentations, pitching ideas and data and hopefully some pizzazz and inspiration. And that means I'm lugging my 7-pound laptop and 1-pound...
by Ted Schadler Should your email live in the cloud? Colleague Chris Voce and I have written a pair of reports to answer that question from the perspectives of an information and knowledge...
Happy New Year! I love holidays because the fog of daily work lifts and important things become clearer. This year, over Christmas, what became suddenly and sparkingly clear is that mobile’s...
I was pretty sure that the v1 (beta?) Apple Maps would have gaps and gaffs, and of course it does. Mapping is hard to do as this excellent analysis from Adrian Covert at Gizmodo makes clear. (If...
By Ted Schadler Following on to Rob's great analyses of Cisco's Jabber and PostPath acquisitions, here are some additional things that Information & Knowledge Management Professionals should...
See these excellent analyses by colleagues Sarah Rotman Epps and Dave Johnson on the Surface. I can totally understand why the Windows team wants its own tablet. After all, Apple has been running...
The Z10 is a beautiful device: designers Todd Wood, Don Lindsay, and their teams have done a great job with the industrial design, the swipe-rich interaction gestures, and a whole lot more. The Z10...
By Ted Schadler What's a zettabyte? It's the same amount of information found on 500 billion DVDs or 75 full-length movies for every human on the planet. And a half a zettabyte, a mere 250...
by Ted Schadler Microsoft today announced the public beta of Exchange 2010. This product is a natural extension and improvement over Exchange 2007 (and anybody on Exchange 2003 should really be...
by Ted Schadler When I stopped into an Apple Store in Palo Alto last summer, it was swarming with cute kids in hot pink tee shirts, logoed with the name of a local day camp. Okay, I...