Meet One-On-One With Forrester Analysts At Our Business & Technology Leadership Forum 2008

Consistently rated as one of the most popular features of Forrester Events, one-on-one meetings give you the opportunity to discuss the unique technology issues facing your organization with Forrester analysts. Business & Technology Leadership Forum attendees may schedule up to two 20-minute one-on-one meetings with the Forrester analysts of their choice, depending on availability. Registered attendees will be able to schedule one-on-one meetings starting on Monday September 15, 2008. Book early!

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B

William Band
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Customer relationship management applications, customer experience management, stakeholder alignment, enterprise CRM
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Matthew Brown
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Marketing and advertising, enterprise portals, intranets and extranets, information and knowledge management
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Peter Burris
Research coverage for Technology Product Management & Marketing professionals
Enterprise marketing platforms, marketing automation, high-tech, application development
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Bobby Cameron
Research coverage for CIOs
IT governance, risk, and compliance; the marketing of IT; serving the business; security and risk
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Marc Cecere
Research coverage for CIOs
Designing IT organizations, changing the culture of an IT organization, IT strategic planning
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Patrick M. Connaughton
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Supply chain management services, supply chain management applications, enterprise mobility, RFID
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Alex Cullen
Research coverage for CIOs
IT organization; IT strategy, planning, and governance; organizational design and change management, IT management
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Boris Evelson
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, business intelligence, OLAP, data warehousing
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Chip Gliedman
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Customer relationship management, help desk/service desk, customer service and support, packaged applications
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Paul D. Hamerman
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
ERP, human capital management, financial management, business performance solutions
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Brian W. Hill
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
eDiscovery, archiving, records and retention management, enterprise content management (ECM)
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Bradford J. Holmes
Research coverage for Vendor Strategy professionals
Tech marketing tools and best practices; government, high-tech, tech marketing strategies
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Rob Karel
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, integration technologies, metadata management, extract
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Rob Koplowitz
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information Workplace, collaboration strategy, collaborative platforms, SharePoint
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George Lawrie
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Retail information technology; consumer goods supply chain; pricing, promotions, and revenue optimization; collaborative processes such as trade promotions management and sales; and operations planning
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Sharyn Leaver
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Packaged applications, business process management, ERP, application strategy and selection
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Craig Le Clair
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
ECM, BPM, output management, document processing services
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Pete Marston
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Customer relationship management, sales force management, software-as-a-service, outsourcing
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Kyle McNabb
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, document imaging, eForms and information capture, enterprise content management
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Thomas Mendel, Ph.D.
Research coverage for Vendor Strategy professionals
Product portfolio strategies, mobile services, business service management, data center management
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Connie Moore
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, business process optimization, IT organization, enterprise content management
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Leslie Owens
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, taxonomy and classification, enterprise search platforms, text mining and analytics
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Natalie L. Petouhoff, Ph.D.
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Customer service and support, customer experience, customer experience management, business strategy for customer experience
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Lisa Pierce
Research coverage for IT Infrastructure & Operations professionals
Voice services, telecommunications services by region, remote access infrastructure, networking
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Tom Pohlmann
Research coverage for CIOs
Business models, high-tech, corporate strategy, tech sector economics, product and solutions strategies
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Stephen Powers
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Information and knowledge management, digital asset management, enterprise content management, Web content management
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Stefan Ried, Ph.D.
Research coverage for Vendor Strategy professionals
Enterprise architecture, Service-oriented architecture, application platforms and programming strategy; application development
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Ted Schadler
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Real-time collaboration tools (instant messaging, presence, document sharing, etc.), cloud-based collaboration and email, mobile collaboration tools and applications, virtual worlds for the enterprise
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Claire Schooley
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
eLearning, information and knowledge management, videoconferencing, Web conferencing, enterprise collaboration, new workforce, retiring workforce
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Scott Tiazkun
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Financial management; governance, risk, and compliance; financial management applications; security and risk
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Zach Thomas
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Human resources management applications, compensation, recruitment strategies, packaged applications
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Tim Walters, Ph.D.
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Web content management, enterprise content management, digital asset management, information and knowledge management
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R "Ray" Wang
Research coverage for Business Process & Applications professionals
Enterprise apps and ERP, software contract negotiations, software partnerships and ecosystems, customer data integration
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Doug Washburn
Research coverage for IT Infrastructure & Operations professionals
Green IT, IT organization, IT infrastructure and operations, IT management
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Gil Yehuda
Research coverage for Information & Knowledge Management professionals
Enterprise Web 2.0 and Social Computing; collaboration strategy, tools, and culture; virtual communities of practice; virtual team collaboration
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Forrester's Business & Technology Leadership Forum 2008

Forrester's Business & Technology Leadership Forum 2008 is coming up soon — September 23-24 in Orlando, Fla. This event is designed to arm technology and business leaders with emerging organizational, process, and technology practices that balance chaos and control to drive new business value. We have a great speaker lineup this year, with keynotes from:

Guest Speakers

• Boyd Beasley, Senior Director, Customer Support, Electronic Arts
• Sandy Carter, Vice President, SOA & WebSphere Strategy, Channels and Marketing, IBM
• Karla Gill, Vice President, Enterprise Workplace Solutions, Marriott International
• Oliver Goh, Business Development Executive, Implenia
• Bob Pearson, Vice President of Communities and Conversations, Dell
• Gene Rawls, Vice President, Continuous Improvement, Wells Fargo Financial
• Donald Toland, Senior Director of Product Strategy, Qwest Communications
• Kenneth Washington, Ph.D., Vice President and Chief Privacy Leader, Lockheed Martin

Forrester Speakers

• Matthew Brown, Principal Analyst, Research Director
• Bobby Cameron, Vice President, Principal Analyst
• Rob Koplowitz, Principal Analyst
• George Lawrie, Principal Analyst
• Sharyn Leaver, Vice President, Research Director
• Connie Moore, Vice President, Research Director
• R "Ray" Wang, Vice President

Of course, the best way to fully benefit from the event is to attend; you can visit Forrester for all of the relevant information. If you're attending, here are some great ways to maximize your experience:

• Check this blog for our in-depth updates from keynotes and track sessions
• RSVP on our Facebook Event page, and network with attendees
• Follow us on Twitter as we plan and launch the event

If you can't be there, you can still stay connected with these platforms. But hopefully we'll see you in Orlando!

Learning Simulations: Harvard Business Publishing Sets The Stage For Exploring Real Business Situations

By Claire Schooley

In the beginning of the year, Harvard Business Publishing launched a collection of online simulations as part of its curriculum that expose learners to real business situations and enforce essential corporate skills. Learning simulations are interactive models of real-life processes, events, or interactions that have distinctive learning outcomes. Users can manipulate variables that change the state of the model — they can make mistakes, learn from them, and try again — emulating a real "learning by doing" approach. With these online simulations, learners can engage in common business situations within realistic scenarios, and learn how to fine-tune their communication, analytical, and decision-making skills.

The first simulation, Universal Rental Car is a pricing simulation focused on teaching employees pricing skills in a managerial environment, as learners take on the role of regional marketing manager at a rental car agency, and are tasked with pricing rental cars in cities across Florida. Sample the Universal Rental Car simulation (login = user, password = user) for three rounds, and explore the Prepare, Analyze, and Decide tabs.

Another popular simulation, Everest, uses Mount Everest as a backdrop for teaching core leadership and team skills, as a group of five team members must work together to achieve their goal of reaching the summit. Harvard Business Publishing plans to add more simulations throughout this year, resulting in a strong group of online simulations. The upcoming summer releases include: Benihana (an operations management simulation focused on the service and operations of the Benihana restaurant chain), and Back Bay Battery (a strategic innovation simulation focused on the innovation and risk involved in product development).

Simulations are quickly becoming a valued learning approach. Look for more off-the-shelf vendors like Harvard Business Publishing that will present learning scenarios, especially in the area of management and leadership development through simulations.

Notes From Oracle OpenWorld

by Connie Moore, Colin Teubner, Rob Karel, Ken Poore, Rob Koplowitz, Stephen Powers, Barry Murphy and Claire Schooley.

A few weeks ago, several Forrester analysts attended Oracle World. Now that we've gotten back and had a chance to think about what we've heard, we wanted to post this blog to share our thoughts with clients. Here are some observations on what we heard from Oracle about BPM and middleware, data integration and data quality, search and collaboration, enterprise content management and social computing, message archiving and retention management, and human capital management.

BPM and Middleware feedback from Colin Teubner:

What really struck me is how much Oracle was talking about middleware. Charles Phillips opened his keynote talking about it and Oracle's application integration architecture (AIA — if you don't know what that is, it's a whole separate discussion), and Larry spent a lot of time in his keynote talking about it too. In fact, middleware has been the fastest growing part of Oracle's business for at least two or three years, and they have several significant advantages over IBM's stack from my perspective.

Specifically, they are talking about having the only business process management suite that covers content-centric processes using the same engine as for integration-centric or people-centric processes. (This discussion wasn't at the executive level, but farther down in the BPM product management area.) They poked fun at "some vendors" who make you use different, acquired technology for different types of processes. I haven't seen specifics of how Oracle's BPEL product (Collaxa) works with Stellent though, but they definitely do NOT go for IBM's idea of a "portfolio" of software. It's a comprehensive stack, and if you don't want to use one piece of it, that's fine — just use the other pieces and they'll integrate with what you have. They don't sell anything that overlaps in functionality with anything else.

Data Integration and Quality feedback from Rob Karel:

My main takeaway from OracleWorld, specifically around Oracle's data integration strategies, is that its data quality software strategy is a mess.

Oracle already has some internal competition from an ETL perspective between its Oracle Warehouse Builder (OWB) product that the Database Group embeds within the 11g database and the Fusion Middleware groups' Oracle Data Integrator (ODI), which was acquired last year from Sunopsis. While Oracle is doing some cross-development between the two solutions, for the most part these two teams operate independently with their own roadmaps and objectives — sometimes competing for mindshare.

The most recent demonstration of this was when I met separately with executives from the database group, the ODI team, and the master data management team and discussed what Oracle is doing about data quality. The ODI team just informed me of a DQ partnership with Trillium Software with the release of Oracle Data Quality for Oracle Data Integrator (ODQODI).  ODQODI is a joint development partnership that packages both Oracle's ODI data integration and Trillium's DQ products into a single license, single install. ODIODQ includes Trillium's batch data profiling, parsing, and matching functionality, although customers who are looking for real time data quality or postal address verification would need to engage Trillium directly to enable those capabilities and services. This is a strange partnership because I expect ODI to be Oracle's "real-time" integration solution, while the partnership only supports batch (not real-time) data quality.

The database team, on the other hand, continues to focus on data as an embedded part of OWB functionality and doesn't seem to care what ODI is doing.  In the meantime, the MDM team is focusing its integration efforts with ODI, but I don't see this Trillium/ODQODI partnership as all that valuable for their MDM product since they should prefer to have real-time/transactional data quality capabilities to complement their MDM offerings.

Oracle has other data quality solutions spread throughout its portfolio including Siebel Data Quality Matching Server used within its Siebel apps environment, recently acquired Hyperion System 9 Financial Data Quality management that came along with its purchase of BI vendor Hyperion, and matching and parsing functionality embedded within its Universal Customer Master, Oracle Customer Hub and Oracle Product Hub MDM offerings. To enhance data quality within its MDM offerings, Oracle also partners with Silver Creek Systems for product data quality and Trillium for customer data quality. 

I believe Oracle will need to reconcile its internal product development and partnering strategies to eliminate the confusion created by so many data quality offerings spread across its portfolio. 

Search and Collaboration feedback from Ken Poore:

I focused on search while at Oracle World. I had several one-on-ones, a few which included my colleague, Matt Brown. We had a session with a partner that had positive things to say about the Oracle Secure Enterprise Search (SES) product and team, most notably that the team was very helpful and took many of their suggestions and rolled it back into the product — a good sign for a still relatively young product. In my experience, that sort of 'listening' only lasts for the first two or three releases of a product. We also had a session with a customer, but it was more portal-centric and turned out to be marginally useful.

I had an extended couple of sessions with Vishu Krishnamurthy (Director of Development for most of their collaboration tools) and several of the product managers. It was a very positive two-way exchange. They shared many of their latest developments, and I shared some my thoughts on their direction as well as some ideas that I have been developing to help push the market along. I felt — and they concurred — that SES is just emerging as a true contender against similar products from IBM and Microsoft. They are still fleshing out a lot of me-too capability, but they are really bolstering their connectivity capabilities and entity extraction, two key areas in the enterprise search market these days that could leap-frog or least enable them to catch up quickly. Oracle has some really solid ideas, especially around distributing components of search indexing to the owners of the applications being searched (CRM, ERP, etc.) instead of leaving it in the hands of the 'search team'. Doing so enhances the buy-in from every department involved and leverages the application owner's expertise and context.

So while I would say there were no earthshaking announcements, I felt like they have a very strong product management, technical, and marketing strategy that will only gain momentum from this point forward. It is a very competitive market, and like IBM, they will struggle trying to be successful against the pure-plays for customers that do not have a significant incumbent investment in Oracle products (or in IBM products, in IBM's case).

Enterprise Content Management and Social Computing feedback from Rob Koplowitz:

I heard a bit about the ECM direction from Rich Buchheim. He states that at least one Stellent product will be retooled to run directly on Content DB. That's an interesting development from a scalability perspective. I suspect that will be a major engineering effort and won't be fully implemented in the next release.

The other thing that was interesting is that WebCenter Suite is being positioned as the standard front-end for Fusion apps. As a matter of fact, one of the defining elements of a "Fusion" app is that it will have a WebCenter front-end. The convergence of WebCenter and Content DB is pretty cool. Essentially, any app using WebCenter will have native access to content stored in Content DB. Essentially, it means that Oracle apps will be able to seamlessly surface content in context in any application. The cool part will be that content generated on one app can be surfaced anywhere. For example, if a document is stored as part of sales process in a SFA app it can be called natively from inside of a support CRM app if they want to see what the customer was promised. Since it's a Web service call from a database with rich metadata the content becomes extremely portable.

The other thing Oracle talked about a lot was Social Computing. There was a big emphasis on blogs, wikis, social networking, tagging and RSS in WebCenter, which again means it can be natively leveraged in Fusion apps.

Enterprise Content Management feedback from Stephen Powers:

I spoke with some members of the ECM team, and they were talking up integrations between Oracle’s Universal Content Management, and Siebel. But Siebel will act as the base application, not UCM. So, if Siebel customers are looking for ECM, Oracle wants to offer them an SOA-based ECM option that sits on top of Siebel, rather than trying to sell them a separate UCM package. They're also making noise around product catalog management, and real-time predictive analytics. They hedged a bit on functionality roadmap, though.

For Digital Asset Management (DAM), Oracle plans to go upmarket, with integrations with Adobe InDesign. And it will be able to have greater video management capabilities, such as management of multi-part files, indexing of closed captioning, management and indexing of call center audio files.

I also spoke with someone from Sealed Media, the DRM vendor that was acquired by Stellent a few months before Oracle bought them. Oracle has rebranded Sealed Media as Information Rights Manager. But I got the sense that they are not very well integrated with the rest of the company; while we spoke about Sealed Media functionality, I didn't get the sense that they're working very closely with other members of the UCM team.

Human Capital Management feedback from Claire Schooley:

HCM people in recruiting and learning talked about the social computing aspects of learning that are coming soon (whatever that means) and that will be a part of Fusion in the future. Here's an overview of the scenario:

An organization that wants to hire an intern who might turn into an employee after graduation would contact colleges and get student recommendations from professors. An email would then be sent to the students suggesting that they go to a link on company's Website and read about the job. If student is still interested, he/she registers and then can interact about the job with those in charge. If still interested, the student completes a proposal on how he/she would approach and carry-out the task along with information about themselves and a picture if they want. These proposals are read and reviewed by staff and online discussion occurs (Web and video) with the final two or three candidates. Once chosen, the successful candidate is put into a partitioned group of temporary employees and completes all the HR forms and information well before they start work. They also are part of a community of practice (CoP) that they can access to get more familiar with organization, project documents, etc. and meet and interact with people on the team they will work on. When they start work, students know and have interacted with the people they will be working with, will have taken care of all HR transactional material — and are ready to work. (The key is that all these technologies are linked seamlessly).

Organizations Need Two Dramatically Different Kinds Of Learning

by Claire Schooley.

Organization’s learning leaders hear the words “informal learning” or “eLearning 2.0” and think, “Oh my, now we have to change the way we provide training!” Yes, you may want to make some changes but, more importantly, you need to look at existing learning within your organization and determine what is training and what is education or development. I see two distinct types of learning that are both complementary, but also dramatically different. Today’s knowledge workers need both.

Training refers to the learning that employees access in order to do their job. This includes traditional mandated training for fields like accounting or pharmaceuticals. But a large percentage of training should be the “just-in-time” kind that gives the employees the information or knowledge refresher that they need to continue their work task. This informal learning is driven by the employee and is generally not tracked except to indicate the number of employees who have accessed the sites. Examples include online mentoring, clicking on the “just-in-time” learning related to the work topic for a three-to-five minute learning nugget, accessing the context-sensitive learning built into the application, or clicking on “expertise location” on the intranet to find a person in the organization who has the expertise to help. This kind of training or knowledge seeking requires a good search engine to find a document, PowerPoint, video, blog, wiki, etc. on the organization’s intranet site. A good practice is to make the five to ten-minute learning objects or course components searchable so an employee can find the exact part of a module or course that will provide the assistance they need.

Education and Development are about deeper, broader learning that employees need in order to grow. Today we are all lifelong learners. Changes in the business world are happening so fast that unless employees are constantly developing their expertise in their field and related fields, they will not be valued employees who move ahead in an organization. Programs both online and classroom-based prepare employees for promotions, transfers, or even planned downsizing. Sometimes these learning experiences may not focus on specific or even anticipated job needs but rather on general employee development. This kind of learning helps employees stay in a state of constant learning readiness, broaden their perspectives, and increase their ability to cope with change. Examples of learning for general education or future development include business acumen courses, leadership skill development, getting along with difficult people, simulated sales training, etc.

Employers should consider offering a mix of both training and education/development. The culture of your organization must put a premium on continual learning and reward employees who are working toward self-improvement and growth, as well as greater job skill expertise. Companies can compete more effectively by helping their employees learn how to learn.

What’s All This Talk About Informal Learning?

by Claire Schooley.

After we leave formal education settings, 80% of our learning is of the informal kind; yet only 20% of corporate education dollars are spent on what is most important to us as employees.  Why are corporations spending 80% of their employee education dollars on that modest 20% of the learning we do?

So, what is informal learning? It’s that unplanned discussion with a colleague over an issue you don’t understand and glimpsing a new perspective on how to deal with an issue that has arisen. It’s sending an IM to a remote colleague to get information on how the company is implementing a procedure, and then setting up a 10-minute phone discussion to go deeper. It’s bouncing ideas for a new project off a colleague, then asking her to question your perspectives—like a kind of informal coach. These sound like things we do every day, right? Some corporate cultures actively encourage and support these informal ways of learning through trust, technology—IM, Expert Location, or good intranet search capability—and a supportive culture, while others frown on “taking time away from work” to talk to colleagues.

So what should we employees do? We should view corporate learning as performance improvement, rather than a matter of how many courses we have completed or what grades we received on the tests. We must take responsibility for learning what we need to know. What do we need to know to get our jobs done? We should be able to tap those short content-pieces—yes, those single-concept, 5-minute learning-nuggets, easily accessible through a word search covering learning catalogs and other intranet documents. Scheduled learning and culture sessions can also provide help in learning how to use the tools effectively and understanding that everyone in the organization has a responsibility to make the company successful through assisting others in informal ways.

Can informal learning be tracked by LMSes? Yes, courses on culture, productivity ideas, technology can be tracked, along with compliance-mandated learning. But the “tracking” of informal learning comes through performance assessment which is becoming an important part of the Human Capital Management (HCM) to develop and maintain a competitive workforce.

Is informal learning happening in your organization? If so, let me hear from you. What initiatives are employees taking? What road blocks are popping up? What’s working well? What’s not?

eLearning Can—and Should—Have Many Homes

by Claire Schooley.

Making the decision of where to place elearning within a company’s organizational structure is often a challenge. Clients have asked me about this a lot in the past few months. Some may say, “Well, that’s easy, it belongs in HR,” Maybe, but not necessarily. I have seen eLearning find homes in five different areas of the business:

1. Human Resources
2. IT
3. Marketing
4. Special department of its own
5. Lines of business

The most common department is HR because learning is tied to performance and career growth. HR takes care of onboarding and a lot of procedural learning at a company is now online. It also shows up in IT especially if there is a lot of in-house production and content involving many kinds of media.

Most people would not think of eLearning managed by Marketing. But it makes perfect sense if your eLearning is closely linked to your success in sales. In this situation, you need to know about the products-- and marketing will make sure you’ve got the right information to make you look smart. Also, this same information can help customers when sales associates look up information on their handhelds and give the customers an answer.

Sometimes learning doesn’t seem to fit well anywhere, and the CEO creates a new department reporting directly to him or other C-level executives. In this scenario, the department usually does a lot of company-wide production as well as production for LOB and even acts as consultants for business units like R&D, sales, operations, and customer service that may already do some of their own short productions.  Organizations going down this path are usually companies with fairly large in-house production unit of proprietary content.

So what’s right for your organization? Take a look at each of these options and see which will give you the efficiency and flexibility needed within the eLearning function. It might be there’s no single answer, and that eLearning is dispersed in several pockets of the organization.

IBM Shifts eLearning Focus To Informal Learning

by Claire Schooley.

Lotusphere was inspiring. The investment and effort that IBM Lotus has made in social computing with its announcement of Lotus Connections is visionary. Although learning is not a part of it in a formal way yet, it’s coming. I spent a number of hours in the Research Lab with researchers from all over the world looking at their ideas; some were more developed than others. These thinkers have taken the step forward in looking at learning as something that is informal, contextual, controlled by the employees, and available when employees need it so they can be successful at a task. 2007 will bring more developments and I’m betting that informal learning will be an important part of Lotusphere 2008. Of course, all this is going to require a culture change within organizations. Companies that encourage people to explore new technology for use as a business tool will be the first adopters. Those, for example, that still don’t allow IM most likely will watch from the sidelines. A knowledge management or collaboration evangelist or champion is important to get social computing started within an organization.