I love reporters. As someone with an M.A. in journalism who then evolved into an analyst, I recognize that both professions occupy approximately the same tier in the industry food chain. In fact, many IT industry analysts were trade press reporters at one point in their careers, and it’s not uncommon for analysts to go back into media institutions later on.

When great longtime IT reporters, such as Computerworld’s Jaikumar Vijayan, call me up to get my thoughts, I’m just as interested in their take on what’s important. Jai recently published an excellent article with my predictions, plus those of another analyst, on the year ahead in analytics. To the jaded reader, these sorts of year-end look-ahead articles may feel like perfunctory rehashes of stuff we’ve been telling them for quite some time, perhaps with a trendy new buzzword thrown in to keep it remotely glance-worthy.

I try not to repeat myself too much. Rather than regurgitate the statements I made in the phone interview with Jai, I’ll highlight how I’m addressing the principal business-analytics trends that I discussed with him — self-service, pervasive, social, scalable, cloud, and real-time—in our 2011 Forrester research agenda:

Community is an ideal toward which all social networks should aspire. In a true community, everybody is pulling for everybody else, sharing whatever assistance, expertise, and insight they possess with anybody who might benefit.

We all know that most communities are a bit more one-sided than that. In most communities, most people are essentially there for the ride, contributing little while benefiting from whatever resources the more generous among them have chosen to share. This is not necessarily a criticism of individuals or of society in general, but rather a recognition that as communities scale beyond close personal relationships, the bonds of reciprocity and altruism often grow weak.

This truism applies just as much to customer communities as to any other. Enterprises have avidly adopted social networks as virtual extensions to such customer relationship management (CRM) functions as call centers and user groups. In the new world of social-network customer communities leveraging blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and other channels, it is not uncommon that a handful of individuals post most of the useful content and feedback while the majority simply consume without contributing. And that’s fine, as long as you keep encouraging and incentivizing these actively engaged individuals —whom Forrester refers to as CRM highly empowered and resourceful operatives (HEROes) — to keep the useful content coming. In the final analysis, these are the sorts of individuals — expert customer service professionals, longtime customers, or even highly enthusiastic hobbyists — who can spell all the difference between true community and a haphazard scattering of nominally affiliated strangers.

Superior customer service is an ethos that pervades the best companies. Everybody who comes into contact with the customer must go that extra mile to make sure customers’ needs come first. Likewise, everyone in the back office must stand ready to swing into action to fulfill orders, resolve technical issues, correct billing anomalies, and generally ensure an all-around great customer experience.

If you’ve been paying attention to business management gurus these past 30 years, you’ve had the foregoing philosophy drummed into your heads. Chances are good that you’ve bought their books, attended their courses, and paid them big bucks to give pep talks at your corporate retreats. Leading management consultants have also brought you up to speed on what exemplar corporate case studies have done to become 100% customer-focused.

In other words, you’re in the choir and would greatly appreciate it if you weren’t being preached at quite so often. If you’re managing a company of any size, what you really want to know is how you can transform your organization into one of these customer-centric juggernauts without the secular equivalent of a religious conversion. Do you really need to subscribe to any particular consultant’s holy writ — or can you simply identify your more customer-focused employees, hold them up as shining examples, and encourage them to share their best practices with colleagues? Can you nurture superior customer service practices that spring organically from your current operations, while at the same time supporting these efforts by encouraging operational personnel to apply the latest information technologies (IT) in new and creative ways?

The most frequent question I get every day is, “What is the best CRM technology solution for my company?” To respond, I worked with a team of five other Forrester analysts (Boris Evelson, Rob Karel, Jim Kobielus, Craig Le Clair, and Roy Wildeman) to evaluate 19 leading CRM solutions against more than 500 product feature, platform, and market presence criteria. Here’s a sneak peek at the key findings from two new reports: “The Forrester Wave^TM: CRM Suites For Large Organizations”, and “The Forrester Wave^TM: CRM Suites for Midsized Organizations”.

Oracle Siebel CRM and SAP CRM still offer the most complete solutions, with improved usability. SAP has been steadily working to fill out its CRM offering, resulting in end-to-end process integration support that no longer comes at the expense of missing CRM functionality. Meanwhile, Oracle Siebel CRM is still the most full-featured CRM solution, with a breadth and depth of functionality for many industry verticals. Both vendors have moved to address key complaints: poor usability, high cost, and long implementation times. Siebel 8.1 features the Siebel User Interface, which can be highly personalized and is task-driven. The SAP CRM 7.0 UI is flexible to support varying roles and offers drag-and-drop personalization that allows any section of any page to be rearranged by the end user. Both vendors are working to lower total cost of ownership (TCO) for their customers by introducing more preintegrations with other solutions from within their respective corporate families and offering “rapid implementation” methodologies and tools to reduce upgrade costs.