Analyst's Photo Name and Title Contact information
Phil Murphy

Phil Murphy
Principal Analyst

Research Coverage

Application Development, Application Modernization, Application Portfolio Management, Architecture & Technology Strategy, Financial Services, Government, IT Management, Portfolio Management & PMOs, Strategic Application Planning

Research Focus

Phil serves Application Development & Program Management professionals seeking to modernize, streamline, and leverage their application portfolios. Phil also addresses application management issues that mesh with the concerns of Enterprise Architecture and executive-level IT management professionals. Phil's application management continuum lays a foundation for organizations to assess capabilities and increase maturity levels against the continuum's four phases:

  • Application modernization: actions that monitor, leverage, renew, replace, or retire existing applications
  • Application portfolio management (APM): Develop information and metrics about existing applications to enable more intelligent modernization decisions.
  • Application rationalization: Use the metrics developed in APM to streamline the portfolio, reduce the effort and cost of lights-on IT, and increase IT's ability to innovate on behalf of the business. 
  • Strategic application planning: Align business and IT visions, create an as-is application/infrastructure context, and communicate context and vision to business peers in ways they understand to enable joint orchestration of IT work that fulfills the joint business/IT vision. 

Previous Work Experience

Phil's technical and managerial experience in IT dates back to 1982, when he held positions with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (independent consultant); Boston University (application developer); and Cullinet Software as a software developer and consultant, before he was promoted to IT director. In 1989, Phil joined insurance company startup Arbella Mutual Insurance as director of applications and worked to create an IT department and implement its initial application and operating environment. In 1992, Phil accepted a director-level position with the National Council on (workers) Compensation Insurance (NCCI), where he developed and distributed a commercial software package, implemented a financial applications package, and rolled out an Internet-based information service to the worker's compensation industry. Phil held the top management position in NCCI's Y2K program office — leveraging offshore programming resources to remediate its applications for Y2K compliance.

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. Phil joined Forrester when it acquired Giga and today brings his broad technical and managerial experience to bear on application and IT management topics that concern Forrester's diverse client base.

Latest Research


Phil Murphy serves Application Development & Program Management professionals.
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Recent Media Citations
SearchCIO, "A Mainframe Application Modernization Strategy That Pays For Itself," December 9, 2009
Computer Zeitung (GER), "Application Costs Are Sinking Into A Big Black Hole," May 22, 2009