Ted Schadler

Vice President, Principal Analyst Serving Application Development & Delivery Professionals

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Ted 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 digital transformation, digital innovation, digital experience platforms, and digital experience service providers. His current interests and collaborations include digital experience architectures, rebuilding the web for our mobile world, personalization, digital customer experience, and digital insights.

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 won the Forrester Bill Bluestein award, which 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, songwriter, and bass player for Crash Davenport, a Baltimore-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 Business Impact Of Digital Experience Technology Is Profitable Growth

Business Case: The Digital Experience Delivery Playbook

August 17, 2018Ted Schadler

Armed with the methods in this report, application development and delivery (AD&D) professionals can help their companies link digital experience strategy to the technology road map. First, assess how digital interactions benefit customers and deliver value to the firm using metrics of profitable growth like increased basket size, percentage of service delivered digitally, and mobile onboarding. Then, prioritize investments based on the total technology cost and time to deliver. Is it an extension or a new platform investment? This is an update of a previously published report; Forrester reviews and updates it periodically for continued relevance and accuracy.
For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

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

Strategic Plan: The Digital Experience Delivery Playbook

August 15, 2018Ted Schadler

As firms like REWE Group and Schneider Electric have learned, digital experience strategy shapes the technology you need — an investment that can take five years and cost between $20 million and $200 million. To help define the strategy, application development and delivery (AD&D) professionals should follow the lead of customer experience teams: 1) Start with a customer journey map; 2) apply cloud-hosted, mobile-first, and insights-driven thinking; and 3) implement a digital experience platform to serve customers along every step of their journey. This is an update of a previously published report; Forrester reviews and updates it periodically for continued relevance and accuracy.
For CMO Professionals

REPORT: Agency Holding Companies Need A Brave New Business Model

The CMO Growth Agenda Forces Agency Holding Companies To Rearchitect Their Raison D'être

August 14, 2018 Jay Pattisall, Ted Schadler

The CMO/agency relationship is at risk. Brands are turning to in-house agencies; company growth agendas bring in CIOs and other business stakeholders; ad budgets face constant pressure; and consultancies are swooping in to take high-margin experience technology services. Our conversations with CMOs and agency holding company CEOs show that agencies need a new business model that puts the client at the center, elevates new services, and blends creative entrepreneurialism with new executional prowess. We've identified a path back to partnership.
For CIO Professionals

REPORT: Make Startup Acquisitions Part Of Your Digital Business Growth Strategy

The High-Tech Industry Has Mastered Startup-Driven Product Innovation — You Can, Too

July 17, 2018Ted Schadler, Mike Chirokas

Investments in emerging technology startups have never been higher, which means the raw materials of technology-based innovation have never been more abundant. CIOs can learn from the high-tech industry about how to make startup acquisitions a key plank of their firms' digital business growth strategies. We analyzed Venture Scanner data and interviewed corporate development officers and investment bankers to help you with the essentials of acquisition and integration.
For CIO Professionals

REPORT: Earn Your Place In The Platform Economy

Adopter, Participant, Or Leader? Here's Your Blueprint For Platform Business Success

May 8, 2018Ted Schadler, Nigel Fenwick

Platform businesses reshape industries by dramatically improving the economics of integration and service delivery. You can participate in a platform economy by exposing capabilities via APIs and adopting partners' platforms. But to lead, digital business leaders must build 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 ecosystem envy.

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 Enterprise Architecture Professionals

REPORT: Lean: The New Business Technology Imperative

Lean Thinking Is Central To The Shift From IT To BT

September 29, 2009Clay Richardson, Connie Moore, John R. Rymer, Ted Schadler, Dave West

Everyone wants to be lean these days, whether when stepping off a scale in the morning or reviewing the cost of running a successful business. But just how do you define "Lean" — especially in the context of business and technology? Do you think of Lean as a way to drive down costs for technology solutions? Or does Lean conjure visions of streamlined business processes that deliver ever-higher levels of productivity and quality? Or does Lean mean creating a Lean business that delivers more customer value and innovation to compete in today's Lean economy? We assembled some of our top analysts on this subject and put them to the test in a no-holds-barred roundtable discussion. The truth is that you must embrace Lean from all perspectives — people, process, and technology — and focus as much on adding value as on eliminating waste.