For Customer Experience Professionals

Member Registration Plagues Health Plan Sites

Interviews Of 17 Health Plans Uncover The Need For Email Addresses

by Elizabeth Boehm, November 20, 2009

The Web is becoming a bigger part of health plans' member service and member communication strategies, but health plans struggle to drive adoption. Forrester recently interviewed customer experience professionals responsible for member service Web sites . . .

For Customer Experience Professionals

Design Sites To Work In A High-Resolution World

The Decline Of 1024 x 768 And What To Do About It

by Ron Rogowski, November 20, 2009

The proliferation of high-resolution screens that well surpass 1024 x 768 adds a new layer of complexity to site design. Not only is there no standard resolution to design for, but higher-resolution screens pose usability challenges for sites that were . . .

For Customer Intelligence Professionals

Marketing Dashboards Advance Strategic Thinking Across The Enterprise

by Julie M. Katz, November 20, 2009

Dashboards allow Customer Intelligence (CI) professionals to better influence marketing strategy and drive corporate activities beyond marketing. But many firms don't use them. Absent a culture of sharing, sufficient resources, and clean data, dashboard . . .

For Security & Risk Professionals

Know Your Code: How Static Analysis Tools Make Applications More Secure

by Chenxi Wang, Ph.D., Andrew Jaquith, November 20, 2009

Many companies, besieged by audit findings and application vulnerabilities, recognize the benefits of eliminating security vulnerabilities early in the software life cycle. For this reason, static analysis technologies for analyzing code-level security . . .

For Interactive Marketing Professionals

Navigating The Twittersphere

How To Market On Twitter

by Nate Elliott, November 19, 2009

Successfully engaging with consumers on Twitter requires both the right overarching strategy and a series of small best practices. Interactive marketers must ensure that consumers can find their brands' accounts, confirm that they are legitimate, and . . .

For Information & Knowledge Management Professionals

Harnessing Social Networking To Drive Transformation

by Rob Koplowitz, November 19, 2009

When one of the world's largest defense contractors says, "We need to move from a culture of 'need to know' to a culture of 'need to share,'" you stop and listen. Competing in an industry driven by the mantra "loose lips sink ships," BAE Systems has identified . . .

For CIOs

Inquiry Spotlight: Retail Point-Of-Sale Systems, Q3 2009

by George Lawrie, November 19, 2009

Retail line-of-business executives know that technology plays a central role in helping to deliver improved customer service with increased margin. They look to CIOs to push what were once purely tactical point-of-sale (POS) systems to become solutions . . .

For Consumer Product Strategy Professionals

Inquiry Spotlight: Consumer Wireless Strategy, Q3 2009

by Julie A. Ask, Seth Fowler, November 19, 2009

Mobile is rapidly expanding as a medium for interacting with consumers, and it will only continue to do so. Many of Forrester's nontelecommunications clients — from the travel industry to consumer product goods to automotive companies to financial firms . . .

For Sourcing & Vendor Management Professionals

Status, Challenges, And Near-Term Tactics For Cloud Services In Enterprise Outsourcing Deals

by Paul Roehrig, Ph.D., November 18, 2009

The blab-o-sphere is full of warnings, proclamations, and sales pitches about cloud services and this is only making it tougher for IT decision-makers to sort the reality from the hype in the face of pressing technology challenges. Decision-makers are . . .

For CIOs

The State Of Point-Of-Sale Systems

Retail CIOs Around The World Expect POS To Become More Strategic

by George Lawrie, November 18, 2009

Retail IT is challenged to support new cross-channel offerings and the ability to sell services and merchandise not provided in the store itself. It also needs to support rapid innovation in point-of-sale (POS) peripherals and the promise of more direct-to-consumer . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Charging Back For Your Virtual Infrastructure

How To Allocate Costs For Virtual Machines And Drive Greater Adoption

by James Staten, November 18, 2009

As you continue to consolidate your server infrastructure and make it more cloudlike, a key hurdle that you must overcome is cost allocation for the virtual infrastructure. While most enterprises are not yet charging back or tracking virtual machine (VM) . . .

For Vendor Strategy Professionals

Market Overview: The Advent Of Enterprise Carbon And Energy Management Systems

Sketching The New Opportunities For IT Vendor Strategists

by Christopher Mines, November 17, 2009

A new liability is coming onto the collective balance sheet of companies around the world: carbon. In the context of increasing awareness of the business and societal risks of climate change, corporate carbon emissions (and the energy consumption that . . .

For Enterprise Architecture Professionals

The Five Essential Metrics For Managing EA

by Jeff Scott, November 17, 2009

Enterprise architects frequently ask what metrics they should use to demonstrate EA's progress and value to the organization. CIOs want to know what they are getting for their investment in EA, and EAs see metrics as an important tool for promoting their . . .

For eBusiness & Channel Strategy Professionals

B2B eBusiness: Preparing For Online Liftoff

by Carrie Johnson, Elizabeth Davis, November 17, 2009

As more and more traditionally nonconsumer brands begin to move online, questions abound: How do we sell online? What do we sell to — or how do we service — our customers online? How do we organize to optimize the channel? The good news is that B2B companies . . .

For Customer Intelligence Professionals

The Privacy Exchange Disconnect

Marketers Must Show Value For Consumer Information

by Dave Frankland, November 16, 2009

Consumers and marketers have contradictory impressions of the value marketers provide in exchange for the consumer data they collect. Marketers claim they deliver more relevant products, services, and ads based on the consumer information they capture. . . .

For Consumer Product Strategy Professionals

US Pay-TV Forecast, 2009 To 2014

by Bobby Tulsiani, November 16, 2009

The pay-TV category is a nearly fully penetrated market, reaching 82% of US households today. With little room to increase the market, cable, satellite, and telecom TV providers are fighting an intense battle for market share. Forrester expects telecom . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

The Low-Hanging Fruit That Service Operations Teams Should Consider Now

by Evelyn Hubbert, November 13, 2009

Some IT organizations are confident that they can weather the storm of our current economic situation. Others believe they can maintain their current staffing level, and some are saying that they can maintain their current IT technology investment levels. . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Q&A: New Workload Adoption On System z Mainframe

Why Linux, Why Mainframe, What "Best Fit" Workloads?

by Brad Day, November 13, 2009

Over the past six quarters, IBM has been very busy turning out a raft of customer case studies on new workload adoption on its System z mainframe, letting customers tell their feature/function/benefit impetus for deciding on the System z mainframe as . . .

For Vendor Strategy Professionals

3Com Gives HP Core Networking — And Amps Up Cisco Competition

The Converged Infrastructure Market Heats Up

by Ellen Daley, November 12, 2009

HP announced an agreement yesterday to acquire 3Com for about $2.7 billion. This deal is mostly about market — not product — acquisition. HP gets China (a strong growth market), a good enterprise switch, a solid security product, and a router portfolio. . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Q&A: The New Math For New Mainframe Workloads

Can IBM's Solution Edition Series Get You To A Beer Budget?

by Brad Day, November 12, 2009

Justifying the transitioning of a wide variety of application types to a mainframe environment requires substantial upfront investigation. Migrating to a mainframe has become increasingly cost-effective thanks to the refresh to IBM's new quad-core System . . .

For Business Process & Applications Professionals

In-Database Analytics: The Heart Of The Predictive Enterprise

by James G. Kobielus, November 12, 2009

Visionary organizations are adopting an emerging practice known as "in-database analytics," which supports more pervasive embedding of predictive models in business processes and mission-critical applications. With in-database analytics, enterprises migrate . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Aligning Your VMware Licensing Strategy With Your Broader Virtualization Plans

by Christopher Voce, Galen Schreck, November 12, 2009

It's not easy for enterprises evaluating their licensing options with VMware. In addition to worrying about the mechanics of how an enterprise licensing agreement (ELA) fits with your internal deployment plans, you need to consider a shifting competitive . . .

For Sourcing & Vendor Management Professionals

Do Your Software Contracts Permit External Use?

Buyers Should Act Now To Avoid Excessive, Unexpected Charges For Basic Third-Party Access To Their Business Systems

by Duncan Jones, November 12, 2009

Many IT sourcing managers are facing unexpected additional software costs because they have used their enterprise systems to work more closely with third parties, only to find that their license agreements include unreasonable extra charges for, or even . . .

For Customer Intelligence Professionals

Assessing Your Customer Intelligence Quotient

A Diagnostic Tool To Gauge Your Firm's Customer-Centric Prowess

by Dave Frankland, November 12, 2009

Forrester introduced the concept of a Customer Intelligence (CI) quotient that indentifies three levels of CI maturity in firms: functional intelligence, marketing intelligence, and strategic intelligence. At the highest maturity level, the Customer Intelligence . . .

For Application Development & Program Management Professionals

SAP Will Retrench With NetWeaver

SAP Will Focus On New Analytics Opportunities, Not Stack Wars

by John R. Rymer, November 12, 2009

Pop quiz: What is SAP's direction with NetWeaver? We couldn't answer that question either, so we traveled to SAP's TechEd conference in October to find out. NetWeaver is an also-ran in enterprise middleware but is vital to the many organizations that . . .