Ted Schadler

Vice President, Principal Analyst Serving Application Development & Delivery Professionals

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Ted Schadler serves digital business professionals. He has 29 years of experience in the technology industry, analyzing the effects of disruptive technologies on people and on businesses. His research agenda focuses on platform business models, digital transformation, digital experience platforms, and digital experience agencies. His current interests and collaborations include digital transformation, digital maturity, platform businesses, mobile web, and maps: the power hidden in plain sight.

Ted is the coauthor of The Mobile Mind Shift: Engineer Your Business to Win in the Mobile Moment (Groundswell Press, June 2014). Companies have a choice: to be present in a customers’ hand — or lose the mobile moment to a competitor or other distraction. This book gives companies the guidance and tools to serve customers in their immediate context and moments of need: Continuously identify mobile moments, design mobile engagement, engineer solutions, and analyze to optimize outcomes. Now that it’s clear that most customers won’t download your app, it’s just as true for the mobile web — even more so for most brands.

Ted is also the coauthor of Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business (Harvard Business Review Press, September 2010). In this groundbreaking and still-current work, Ted analyzes how important it is in the age of the customer for companies to empower employees with the tools and confidence to directly engage customers.

Previous Work Experience

Ted’s work at Forrester spans 20 years, starting with the early days of the Internet, open source, and web services. In 1999, Ted launched Forrester’s TechRankings™ product, now the Forrester Wave™. In 2003, Ted became a Forrester Bill Bluestein award winner; the award is granted annually to one of Forrester’s most influential analysts. In 2005, Ted analyzed the impact of technology on customers’ online and mobile behavior. He ran Forrester’s data business during this period. In 2009, Ted launched Forrester's Workforce Technology Assessment, the industry's first benchmark survey of workforce technology adoption. Since 2014, Ted has focused on digital business and digital experience delivery.

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, after dropping out of MIT’s Ph.D. physics program, Ted was a singer and bass player for Crash Davenport, a Maryland-based rock-and-roll band.

Education

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.

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Ted Schadler

Vice President, Principal Analyst Serving Application Development & Delivery Professionals

Read Ted's blog posts

Previous Work Experience

Education

Research Coverage

Ted Schadler's Research

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For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

REPORT: The Forrester Wave™: Midsize Digital Experience Agencies, Q4 2018

The 12 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up

November 6, 2018Ted Schadler

In our 21-criterion evaluation of midsize digital experience agencies, we identified the 12 most significant midsize vendors — AKQA, CapTech, CI&T, Huge, ICF Next, Kin and Carta, Mirum, Mphasis, MullenLowe Profero, R/GA, Softvision, and Valtech — and researched, analyzed, and scored them. This report shows how each provider measures up and helps application development and delivery professionals make the right choice.
For CIO Professionals

REPORT: Insights-Driven Businesses Set The Pace For Global Growth

The Vision Report Of The Insights-Driven Business Playbook

October 19, 2018 Brian Hopkins, James McCormick, Ted Schadler

A new kind of company — we call them insights-driven businesses — has formed. They are growing at an average of more than 30% annually and are on track to earn $1.8 trillion by 2021. These customer-obsessed firms systematically harness insights across their organization and implement them to create competitive advantage through software. Read this report to find out how insights-driven business are different from most data-aware firms and how CIOs can help redirect their firm's data ambitions toward effective insights and action. This is an update of a previously published report; Forrester reviews and updates it periodically for continued relevance and accuracy.
For eBusiness & Channel Strategy Professionals

REPORT: Your Digital Experience Strategy Starts With A Customer Journey Map

Identify And Invest In The Moments That Matter With The Help Of This Three-Part Planning Guide: Strategy, Business Impact, And Road Map

October 3, 2018Ted Schadler

Your customers expect the same quality of digital experiences from you as they get from Amazon, Netflix, and Uber. That will require transforming your experiences and the operations that support them. To get everybody on the same page, digital business leaders should conduct a three-part planning process: 1) Build a customer journey map highlighting the moments of engagement; 2) prioritize the moments and processes based on the benefit to customers and the value to you; and 3) pursue a two-path road map to move quickly while laying the foundations for the future.
For CIO Professionals

REPORT: Top Research For CIOs: The Platform Economy

Every Business Can Have A Platform, But Not All Platforms Will Be Successful

September 27, 2018 Matthew Guarini, Ted Schadler

Platforms will reshape every industry, delivering improved customer experiences and reshaping corporate value chains. Forrester has been researching the platform economy over the past few years, and this report highlights our best insights to help you understand and implement the key elements of a successful platform business. Understanding the business implications as well as providing the right technology are critical for CIOs as their companies look to win in the platform game. Read this report to learn how CIOs can plot a successful course forward.
For eBusiness & Channel Strategy Professionals

REPORT: How To Build A Platform Business

Start With A Real Customer Problem, Not APIs And Ecosystem Envy

September 17, 2018Ted Schadler, Nigel Fenwick

Platform businesses reshape industries by dramatically improving the economics of integration and service delivery. To earn a place in the platform economy, digital business leaders must commercialize services that customers and suppliers embed into their operations. We interviewed 33 platform businesses, including Dropbox, General Electric, PayPal, and SupplyOn, to find out how. The answer? Start with a real customer problem, not APIs or ecosystem envy. Your biggest opportunity is probably to platform-enable your capabilities to enter new markets.

For eBusiness & Channel Strategy Professionals

REPORT: The Digital Business Imperative

February 15, 2017Ted Schadler, Nigel Fenwick

Customers' power in the marketplace continues to ramp up, so eBusiness leaders still need to transform digital customer experiences, including marketing, sales, and channels. The ability to align products, operations, and business models to what we call a "customer-obsessed operating model" will determine firms' ultimate success. To digitally transform both experiences and operations, eBusiness professionals will apply technology to these facets of the business, ensuring that they are customer-led and insights-driven. This is an update of a previously published report. Forrester reviews and updates it periodically for continued relevance and accuracy; we revised this edition to factor in new data, examples, and ideas.
For CIO Professionals

REPORT: Mobile Is The New Face Of Engagement

CIOs Must Plan Now For New Systems Of Engagement

February 13, 2012Ted Schadler, John McCarthy

By 2016, smartphones and tablets will put power in the pockets of a billion global consumers. Mobile is not simply another device for IT to support with a shrunken website or a screen-scraped SAP application. Rather, mobile is the manifestation of a much broader shift to new systems of engagement. These systems of engagement help firms empower their customers, partners, and employees with context-aware apps and smart products. To remain vital in this business technology reformation, CIOs must step up and work with other executives to establish an "office of the chief mobility officer" to implement an enterprisewide mobile strategy. This team will coordinate the business and technology investments under a "design for mobile first" mantra that delivers four immediate benefits: 1) fuel profitable growth with stickier offerings and mobile self-service; 2) move faster along the mobile learning curve; 3) aggregate mobile project budgets to fund needed engagement technology; and 4) grow from an IT group focused on systems of record to a business technology group focused on systems of engagement.
For B2C Marketing Professionals

REPORT: The State Of Consumers And Technology: Benchmark 2008

A Generational Analysis Of The North American Benchmark Survey

July 21, 2008Charles S. Golvin, Ted Schadler

This is a graphical analysis of Forrester's North American Technographics® Benchmark Survey, 2008. It is our annual guide to device adoption and forecasts, demographics, and technology attitudes and behaviors based on a mail survey of 60,847 adults.
For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

REPORT: Build A Four-Tier Digital Engagement Platform

Road Map: The Mobile App Development Playbook

March 22, 2018 Michael Facemire, Ted Schadler

Mobile is pushing aging web architectures to the brink. The three-tier architecture built for a browser-led PC world can't flex, scale, or respond to the needs of a good mobile experience or the emerging requirements for connected products. Mobile's volatility and velocity of change require a distributed four-tier architecture that we call an "engagement platform." The engagement platform separates technical capabilities into four parts: client, delivery, aggregation, and services. App developers need to start planning immediately for the migration from three tiers to four. This is an update of a previously published report; Forrester reviews and updates it periodically for continued relevance and accuracy.
For CIO Professionals

REPORT: Digital Insights Are The New Currency Of Business

Beginner Level: Technology Practices For Insights-Driven Businesses

January 12, 2018 Brian Hopkins, Ted Schadler

Businesses are drowning in data but starving for insights. Worse, they have no systematic way to consistently turn data into action. This can't continue. Demanding customers and competitive pressures require firms to treat insights — not just data — as a business asset. Firms need to create "systems of insight," a combination of people, process, and technology, to close the gap between insights and action. Read this report to see how CIOs can lead their firms to find, test, and codify digital insights in software, leading to more intelligent engagement and better decisions. This is an update to a previously published report.