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 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...
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...
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 will be stuck with burdensome, expensive application portfolios until they take the steps necessary to rationalize and streamline the portfolios. But streamlining the portfolio with poor...
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...
Lower Maintenance Costs And Change IT Demand Governance
As long as IT spends the majority of the IT budget for "lights on" operational and maintenance activities against existing applications, CIOs will be criticized by business executives for their...
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....
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...
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...
Forrester surveyed 221 IT decision-makers about their application maintenance habits and preferences — how they organize, budget, and transfer knowledge, as well as what they would do to...
The coming surge in the retirement of workers born into the Baby Boomer generation represents a significant risk to private-sector and public-sector organizations that cannot be ignored. The problem...
Firing the next salvo in the rapidly consolidating project portfolio management (PPM) market, Planview publicly announced its acquisition of competitor Business Engine on February 13, 2007, although...