Boris Evelson

Vice President, Principal Analyst Serving Application Development & Delivery Professionals

Boris serves application development and delivery professionals. He is a leading expert in insights-driven business (IDB) capabilities. Boris delivers strategic guidance, helping enterprises define IDB strategies, governance, and architectures and identify vendors and technologies that help them put information to use in business processes and end user experiences.

Boris' current research focuses on the practical and actionable best practices for building IDB strategies and roadmaps, including a holistic look at people, process, data, and technology components. Boris also continues to explore emerging trends such as infusion of AI capabilities into IDB technologies and how advanced IDB capabilities are a key part of modern adaptive enterprises.

Previous Work Experience

Boris has more than 30 years of experience with enterprise software and applications implementation, management consulting, and strategic advisory skills. Most recently, Boris was a managing partner at Textra, a boutique strategic advisory firm serving all IT constituents: users, vendors, and investors. Boris cofounded Textra after spending several years as a VP and a strategic technology advisor at JPMorgan/LabMorgan, where he led many successful internal BI initiatives, advising the bank's large enterprise software clients on enterprise adoption issues and product and marketing strategies. Prior to JPMorgan, Boris served as a senior manager of data warehousing and customer relationship management (CRM) practices at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Boris started his career at Citibank, where, among many other successful projects, he implemented the bank's first global credit risk data warehouse.

Education

Boris holds a degree in music education from Moscow Gnessin School Of Music, Russia.

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Boris Evelson

Vice President, Principal Analyst Serving Application Development & Delivery Professionals

Read Read Boris's blog posts

Previous Work Experience

Education

Boris holds a degree in music education from Moscow Gnessin School Of Music, Russia.

Research Coverage

Boris Evelson's Research

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For CIO Professionals

REPORT: Evolve Data And Analytics Roles And Skills For The Adaptive Enterprise

Advanced Level: People Practices For Insights-Driven Businesses

February 26, 2021Boris Evelson, Cinny Little

Insights-driven businesses (IDBs) must continuously build and improve on five competencies: strategy, people, process, data, and technology. Weaknesses and gaps in any one of the competencies — including the people part of the equation — will decrease the chances for success of the entire IDB approach. This report for senior data and analytics leaders recommends new and emerging roles, responsibilities, and skills that are critical to improving the overall success and adaptiveness of insights-driven efforts as companies strive to become future fit.
For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

REPORT: The Forrester Tech Tide™: Enterprise Business Insights And Analytics, Q1 2021

Intermediate Level: Technology Practices For Insights-Driven Businesses

February 17, 2021Boris Evelson

Turning raw data into actionable insights is increasingly critical to firms' ability to win, serve, and retain customers. To accelerate their journey to become insights driven, companies are evaluating and adopting a range of contributing technologies, platforms, solutions, and professional services. This Forrester Tech Tide™ report presents an analysis of the maturity and business value of the 20 market categories that support creating and scaling business insights across the enterprise. Data and insights leaders should read this report to shape their firm's investment approach to these technologies.
For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

REPORT: The Forrester Wave™: Digital Decisioning Platforms, Q4 2020

The 13 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up

December 8, 2020 Mike Gualtieri, Boris Evelson

In our 22-criterion evaluation of digital decisioning platform (DDP) providers, we identified the 13 most significant ones — ACTICO, CRIF, Decisions, Experian, FICO, FlexRule, IBM, InRule, Pegasystems, Red Hat, SAS, Sparkling Logic, and TIBCO Software — and researched, analyzed, and scored them. This report shows how each provider measures up and helps application development and delivery (AD&D) professionals select the right one for their needs.
For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

REPORT: Now Tech: Digital Decisioning Platforms, Q3 2020

Forrester's Overview Of 24 Digital Decisioning Platforms Providers

August 25, 2020 Mike Gualtieri, Boris Evelson

Digital decisioning platforms (DDPs) streamline and govern digital decision logic authoring, analytics, and execution, so you don't have to fight an uphill battle to manage business rules and/or decision logic buried in spaghetti code. But to realize these benefits, you will first have to select from a diverse set of vendors that vary by size, functionality, geography, and vertical market focus. AD&D pros working with their business colleagues should use this report to understand the value they can expect from a DDP provider and to select one based on size and functionality.
For Enterprise Architecture Professionals

REPORT: More Options, More Confusion — The Paradox Of Intelligent Document Extraction

Eleven Criteria Will Help You Navigate Through The Fog

August 24, 2020 Craig Le Clair, Boris Evelson

Intelligent document extraction platform (IDEP) use case opportunities are heating up. Early solutions offered a high level of automation but a low level of accuracy and provided little insight. Combining computer vision with advances in machine learning has made solutions more valuable and easier to build and maintain. But these improvements make choosing among the platform category alternatives even harder. This report describes the options and provides a downloadable tool to allow enterprise architecture (EA) pros to compare them.

For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

REPORT: Topic Overview: Business Intelligence

November 21, 2008Boris Evelson

Business intelligence (BI) is a set of methodologies, processes, architectures, and technologies that transform raw data into meaningful and useful information. It allows business users to make informed business decisions with real-time data that can put a company ahead of its competitors. Traditionally, core features like reporting and analytics have been the focus of BI technology choices, but as those features get commoditized, a whole new set of possibilities has emerged. Forrester's BI research shows that the technology is evolving and that enterprises on the cutting edge of these new trends can gain competitive advantage in their industries.
For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

REPORT: The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q3 2008

July 31, 2008Boris Evelson

In Forrester's 151-criteria evaluation of enterprise business intelligence (BI) platform vendors, we found that IBM Cognos and SAP Business Objects maintain their leadership positions, while Oracle and SAS Institute move into leadership positions in enterprise BI thanks to the richness of their functionality, ability to scale, and the completeness of their corporate and product vision and strategy. Actuate, Information Builders, Microsoft, MicroStrategy, SAP, and a new entrant, TIBCO Spotfire, came out as Strong Performers following very closely on the heels of the Leaders, offering very respectable alternatives and a multitude of choices for information and knowledge management (I&KM) professionals. New entrants to this Forrester Wave™ evaluation of enterprise BI platforms (though not new to the market) are Panorama Software and QlikTech, who, while lacking the breadth of features to qualify them as single, large-enterprise BI solutions, are reputable Contenders. In some very specific BI use cases, they even outperform the Leaders.
For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

REPORT: The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Business Intelligence Platforms, Q4 2010

IBM Cognos, SAP BusinessObjects, and Oracle Lead, With Information Builders, SAS, Microsoft, and MicroStrategy Close Behind

October 20, 2010Boris Evelson

In Forrester's 145-criteria evaluation of enterprise business intelligence (BI) platform vendors, we found that IBM Cognos, SAP BusinessObjects, Oracle, Information Builders , SAS, Microsoft, and MicroStrategy led the pack because of the completeness of not just BI, but overall information management functionality. Actuate came out as a Strong Performer on the heels of the Leaders offering equal — or in some cases superior — BI functionality, but it mostly relies on partners for the rest of its information management capabilities. TIBCO Spotfire also came out as a Strong Performer offering top choices for analytics, even surpassing other Strong Performers in the overall information management arena based on its traditional strength in middleware and application integration. Last but not least, QlikTech and Panorama Software moved up from Contenders and into the Strong Performers category based on the continuous improvements in their analytical capabilities.
For Application Development & Delivery Professionals

REPORT: Build An Agile BI Organization To Support An Insights-Driven Culture

February 19, 2019Boris Evelson

An insights-driven organizational culture is key to enterprise success and competitive differentiation, and Agile business intelligence (BI) is a required foundational component to make it succeed. This report dives into the people part of the Agile BI tetrad — Agile BI software development, organizations, processes, and technologies. It provides an organizational framework that describes how application development and delivery (AD&D) professionals working on BI initiatives can align their BI organization for agility. 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: Quantify The Tangible Business Value Of BI

January 10, 2018Boris Evelson, Martha Bennett

This report guides application development and delivery (AD&D) professionals working on business intelligence (BI) initiatives through the maze of BI business case categories and typical BI ROI components, and it identifies areas where quick wins are possible. This is an update of a previously published report; we revised this edition to factor in the latest findings from Forrester's Q4 2016 Global Business Intelligence Business Case Online Survey.