Shame on you if you share your password. The consequences can ruin your sterling reputation, violate legal terms of service, promote fraud and identity theft, and give ex-lovers weapons of mass digital destruction. We all do it, despite the risks. Share your Netflix password with your BFF so she can watch House Of Cards and season 4 of Arrested Development. Reveal your Amazon password to your teenage son so he can rent college textbooks using your account. The list of examples goes on.

In an effort get ahead of the curve, I’ve been looking at the strategic advice that Forrester’s Marketing and Strategy (M&S) analysts are giving to their clients in marketing roles.  This is in the hopes that we can help EA practices better communicate, plan, and align to what their marketing leaders are thinking – but aren’t necessarily communicating.

What I’m finding is that your marketing team is strategizing for an odd future: An era of pre-cognition, driven by an undeniable and powerful consumer trend: The emerging base of consumers value relevancy over privacy. They’re willing to trade privacy for new services – and their inventory of sellable secrets grows while their avenues for selling them become wider.  If you’ve guessed this has something to do with mobility, you’re right. What I’m finding our M&S analysts recommending is not only interesting (and in some ways terrifying), but could have an overwhelmingly positive impact on an EA practice’s value to the organization, bringing it closer to tangible revenue contribution. But only EA practices ready to accept this new mission will see this benefit.

Translating the guidance from Forrester’s M&S analysts, there are five things that EA leaders must think about if they are to enable this future:

This morning we released the latest version of an annual client favorite: “How Companies Improved Their CXi Scores, 2013.”

As we do each year, we compiled a list of brands whose scores went up five or more points in our Customer Experience Index over the past year (in this case, between 2012 and 2013). We asked CX leaders from those brands if they’d be willing to tell us what they did to drive those improvements. Finally, we synthesized their answers into a list of best practices that others can learn from.

As you’d expect, we heard about a host of projects designed to boost the three aspects of customer experience quality. Here’s just a sampling of what we uncovered:

• Meets needs. Marriott used one of my favorite qualitative research techniques — diary studies — to understand exactly when its guests would need a mobile device during their travels. The firm identified roughly 300 user needs that a mobile device could fill, prioritized them, and is using the resulting hierarchy as a road map for future investment.
• Easy. Vanguard and Progressive were just two of the brands that said they upgraded website designs to make it easier for customers to get the information they need online.
• Enjoyable. Days Inns trained more than 20,000 employees on how to make hotel guests feel welcomed.

Forrester research has always identified security as a major impediment to broad scale implementation for cloud, regardless of the model, SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, the adoption rate has been slowed by security concerns. Cloud providers recognize this is an impediment to selling cloud services and in response are strengthening their security controls. In Forrester’s Forrsights® research program we interview over 2000 security decision makers on a variety of security issues and topics. Cloud security tops the list of concerns regarding cloud deployments.

The appetite on the buy-side is very real for secure IT cloud infrastructures. Our research shows a lot of very strong interest in the deployment of private cloud platforms because of the elasticity, reduced cost and cycle times required to deploy solutions in these environments.

This week Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced that AWS GovCloud (U.S.) and all U.S. AWS Regions have received an Agency Authority to Operate (ATO) from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) requirements. 

Obtaining FedRAMP certification indicates AWS’ focus on providing strong security controls for its cloud offerings. Forrester assumes AWS commercial clients could benefit from this as well by AWS security processes propagating to other areas of AWS’ cloud business.