Over the past year, we’ve been discussing — through our research and client interactions — the issues involved with digital customer experiences. What’s interesting about this particular problem is how quickly the market is changing and how the issues cut across many roles and aspects of the business. How do you build a digital experience strategy that best suits your business needs and is inclusive of the roles that have a stake in digital experience success?

We have two Forrester webinars planned over the next week to discuss these very issues. Tomorrow’s webinar (November 20) will be held at 2:00 p.m. UK time (3:00 pm CET), and my colleagues David Aponovich, Jonathan Browne, Bobby Cameron, and I will discuss how digital experience strategies affect roles such as CIOs, Customer Experience Professionals, and Application Development & Delivery professionals. Next Tuesday (November 27) John Rymer, Adele Sage, and I will do a similar webinar at 1:00 pm ET/10:00 am PT. Both of these webinars will be fast-moving, interactive discussions and will use a Pardon the Interruption-style format where we’ll cover a number of questions about DX strategies and give ourselves 3 minutes to discuss each question before moving on. We’ll also be taking questions from the audience.

We are inundated with client inquiries about #BigData. Clients want to know everything. What is the business case? What advanced visualization and predictive analytics tools should we use? Where do we find data scientists? What store, process, and access (SPA) technologies should we invest in? Among these questions, clients frequently ask about Hadoop solutions. Hadoop is one of many #BigData technologies, but it is among the hottest in terms of vendors offering Hadoop solutions to overcome the many shortcomings of just downloading the Hadoop open source binaries.

Forrester Wave™: Hadoop Solutions, 2013

I am pleased to announce that Noel Yuhanna and I plan to launch new Forrester Wave research on Hadoop solutions. The research will begin in January 2013, and we plan to publish in May 2013. This new evaluation will not be an exact update of the previous The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Hadoop Solutions, Q1 2012. The new Forrester Wave will have updated criteria, a lab evaluation, and may have a different mix of vendors.

Calling All Hadoop Vendors

We know that investing in customer service is good for business and can positively impact your revenue. However, building a business case for customer service investments is challenging, as you must understand the benefits and associated costs of the investments.

For some customer service technologies, such as workforce management, email, and chat, the business benefits are very clear. For other customer service technologies, such as social customer service or knowledge management, the business benefits are more difficult to precisely quantify. Yet in all cases, business benefits fall into one of three categories: reducing operational costs, improving productivity, or enhancing the customer experience. Examples include:

I posted a note yesterday that's been a long time coming. In doing the research for Forrester's mobile app development playbook, I've been talking with all sorts of companies that build mobile apps. Build Five-Star Mobile Apps is the first collection of those observations, but it won't be the last. The premise of the document was simple - find out how companies with top-rated apps in markets like the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store design, build, test, release, and maintain their mobile apps. While there's great diversity in approach, common factors fell out of my interviews, and these practices will help you organize your own efforts:

1. Assemble small, focused development teams. The largest development teams we found had fewer than 10 people. When teams grew larger, they were subdivided into platform-specific teams (i.e. the Android team or the iOS team). Small teams can move fast and keep impedance to a minimum but also require substantial changes in how they perform design and testing.  

2. Favor simple development tools over complex ALM processes. The need for speed that characterized the development processes we found means that most traditional ALM tools hurt more than they help. Gone are formal, text-based requirements documents and heavyweight SCM systems. Smaller code bases with less branching mean tools like Git shine. But it's not all airy castles - testing creates a real headache, so we're seeing lots of experimentation with device emulators, simulators, and even basic tricks like deploying graphic mock-ups to devices to get early user feedback.