I'm wildly excited for Forrester's upcoming Consumer Forum entitled "Unleash Your Organization To Serve Empowered Customers," and I hope you are as well. Carrie Johnson, who leads our research team focused on helping you, the eBusiness & Channel Strategy professional, is the research champion for the event. And I have to say, she's done a wonderful job putting together an A+ event that I know will be incredibly relevant to the challenges you face in your role every day.

Aside from the opportunity to attend track sessions, and network and learn from peers, I'm most looking forward to the internal and external speaker presentations. This year, Forrester's Charles Golvin and Josh Bernoff will kick off back-to-back presentations. Charles will talk about ubiquitous customer connectivity, what it means, and how you should work to ensure you effectively serve your customers anytime and via any channel. Josh will then introduce concepts from his new book, Empowered, focusing his comments on how to empower your teams to use social, mobile, cloud, and video technologies to create innovative new customer connections thereby driving effective customer experiences and revenue. As executive champion for the Forum, I've received a sneak peak of both presentations, and they are not to be missed.

And of course, we've got a great line up of external contributors. A couple of speakers that will have specific advice for eBusiness executives include Robert Katz, Chairman and CEO, Vail Resorts who will talk about the financial benefits he has seen as a result of empowering Vail's employees to connect with customers. And, Larry Bruck, Senior Vice President, Global Media and Marketing Operations, Kellogg will discuss how to scale from individual to organizational excellence to capitalize on the full potential of connected customers and employees.

I hope to see you all in Chicago!