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

Nigel serves CIOs and business technology leaders, focusing on the role of technology as an enabler of business outcomes. His research focuses on the intersection of technology and marketing and includes coverage of business and technology strategy, digital business, social business strategy, marketing technology, and technology trends and their impact on competitive advantage.
Ever since becoming an executive director and CIO at Reebok UK at the age of 26, Nigel has consistently led many technology industry trends: He was the first CIO to partner with Infosys to pioneer the offshore development model; he was the first CIO to introduce a marketing role to IT; and he was an early advocate of the business relationship management role that is now so critical to many IT organizations. Nigel went on to a successful career in retail technology marketing with Radius Retail and Transatlantic Software before becoming an entrepreneur, starting up an eCommerce research publishing business and a GPS fleet management software business. He joined Forrester as the general manager of the IT Leadership Boards business in 2006, growing the business more than 300% in three years. Having spent equal time over his career in IT, marketing, and general management, Nigel now brings a unique business technology perspective to his research at Forrester.
Since becoming an analyst, Nigel's leading-edge research has focused on business at the intersection of IT and marketing. Recognized as a visionary with insight into emerging trends, Nigel has published research on social business strategy, business technology strategy, innovation, retail, and marketing. His latest research on digital business examines the role of technology in delivering outstanding customer experience.
Nigel holds a B.A. (hons) in computing in business from the University of Huddersfield and an M.B.A. with concentrations in marketing and international business from Warwick Business School at the University of Warwick.
I get many inquiries on the differences and pros and cons of MOLAP versus ROLAP architectures for analytics and BI. In the old days, the differences between MOLAP, DOLAP, HOLAP, and ROLAP were...
Wanted to run the following two questions and my answers by the community: Q. What is the average age of reporting applications at large enterprises? A. Reporting apps typically involve source data...
I know, I know, this is what analysts do. But I personally would never want to get involved in doing a BI market size – it’s open game for serious critique. Here are some of the reasons,...

I recently had both the privilege and pleasure to do a deep dive into the cold and warm BI waters in Russia and Israel. Cold - because some of my experiences were sobering. Warm - because the...
We have many questions about business intelligence (BI): 1) If we invest in visualization-based discovery tools, is a dashboard still needed? 2) Some firms claim a data warehouse is no longer needed...
Tools And Technology: The Business Intelligence Playbook
Building custom business intelligence (BI) solutions is time-consuming and inflexible; therefore, application development and delivery (AD&D) pros heading BI projects should move away from a...
Today IBM announced its plans to acquire Vivisimo - an enterprise search vendor with big data capabilities. Our research shows that only 1% to 5% of all enterprise data is in a structured, modeled...
Assessment: The Business Intelligence Playbook
Forrester's business intelligence (BI) maturity self-assessment model helps BI professionals quickly assess the maturity of their current-state environments. It also allows BI pros to benchmark their...
Agility Will Shape Business Intelligence For The Next Decade
Forrester continues to see ever-increasing levels of interest in and adoption of business intelligence (BI) platforms, applications, and processes. But while BI maturity in enterprises continues to...
Business process professionals driving data management initiatives face many challenges when creating complex, cross-enterprise, multiyear strategies for data management, business intelligence (BI),...
Performance Management: The Business Intelligence Playbook
Business intelligence (BI) is often defined as processes and technologies to manage business performance, with the ultimate goal of making more informed decisions based on real data, not hunches. But...

We are looking for a comparative analysis of the financial reporting tools that major US insurance companies are using to perform daily, monthly, quarterly, and year-end reports, BI analytics, and...
Align Data Management Roles To Create Stronger Business Value
The continuing explosion in data volume, increasing numbers of business users, growing data complexity, compliance requirements, need to support global operations, and growing need for real-time...
As I was doing research for our Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q4 2010, I couldn’t help but remember a dear old friend of mine, who was/is one of the...
Do you think you are ready to tackle Big Data because you are pushing the limits of your data Volume, Velocity, Variety and Variability? Take a deep breath (and maybe a cold shower) before you...
I get tons of questions about "how much it costs to develop an analytical application." Alas, as most of us unfortunately know, the only real answer to that question is “it depends.” It...
Mobile Tablet PCs, Not Phones, Will Create Critical Mass For Enterprise Adoption
Mobile devices and mobile Internet are everywhere. Over the past few years, Forrester has tracked continuously increasing levels of adoption and maturity for mobile business applications, but not so...
Would you trust a car salesman who’s not driving the type of car he’s trying to sell you? Would you trust a nutritionist or a dietitian who’s not in a good shape? Probably not....
Do you have either anecdotal information or, preferably, research papers that spell out average annual spending on business intelligence (BI) and/or best-in-class spending on BI? We're trying to...
Road Map: The Business Intelligence Playbook
In the face of rising data volume and complexity and increased need for self-service, enterprises need an effective business intelligence (BI) reference architecture to utilize BI as a key corporate...

Actuate BIRT Leads, With Jaspersoft Enterprise, SpagoBI, Pentaho Enterprise, And Pentaho Community Close Behind
Comparing open source BI technologies is often an apples-to-oranges comparison: 1) not all vendors include the same functionality in the free community versions of the software versus commercial open...
I often see two ends of the extreme when I talk to clients who are trying to deal with data confidence challenges. One group typically sees it as a problem that IT has to address, while business...
Open source software (OSS) and business intelligence (BI) are two related market segments where Forrester sees continually increasing interest and adoption levels. BI specifically continues to be one...