Industry Research

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July 27, 2007

The Forrester Wave: ANZ SOA Consulting And Integration Services, Q3 2007

Forrester evaluated leading SOA consulting and integration services providers across 50 criteria and found that IBM and Accenture have established early leadership thanks to their strong technical capabilities and clear focus on business outcomes. BearingPoint and Infosys are Strong Performers. Although constrained by their smaller size or lack of business focus, their offerings are competitive and both have good client references. A number of emerging providers that are currently developing SOA capabilities will provide more competition to the existing market leaders and strong performers over the next few years. Included in this report is an interactive provider comparison tool that includes detailed evaluations and customizable rankings.

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July 26, 2007

Social Computing Strategy For Life Sciences Firms

Like it or not, Social Computing is coming to the life sciences industry. If you don't believe us, check out the YouTube video of a purported Eli Lilly sales rep dishing ZYPREXA's side effects or read the passionate consumer comments on GlaxoSmithKline's AlliConnect blog. Harnessing social media promises big benefits like improving consumer trust in brands, but it also brings formidable risks like adverse event reporting complexity driven by consumer comments in forums and blogs. To navigate the unknown waters of social media safely, life sciences firms must take four steps: 1) educate executives and legal; 2) identify internal innovators and existing learning; 3) build a task force; and 4) anticipate organizational change and internal resource demands to arrive at a sensible strategy.

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July 25, 2007

European Mobile Operators' Cross-Channel Experience, 2007

Consumers rate good customer service as one of the top three purchase decision criteria when choosing an operator. Forrester applied its Cross-Channel Review methodology to four leading mobile operators in Europe — O2, Orange, T-Mobile, and Vodafone — to evaluate their services across channels. We found that the customer experiences they offer across channels have many flaws, but they also demonstrate some best practices. To get better — and improve their profitability — firms should investigate the desired paths to purchase of their target audience and turn this information into a seamless cross-channel experience.

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July 24, 2007

Electronics Retailers' Cross-Channel Experience, 2007

As part of an analysis of 16 firms, Forrester evaluated the customer experiences delivered by four large consumer electronics retailers — Best Buy, Circuit City, RadioShack, and Wal-Mart. Overall, the retailers ended up with the highest average score compared with other industries, but the firms still delivered poor experiences in IVR systems, email, and channel transitions. But while each of the electronics retailers suffered from a different set of problems, our analysis also uncovered a number of good practices, such as Circuit City's product recommendation tool and RadioShack's phone agents who proactively directed users to Web self-service.

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July 23, 2007

Building Better Online Brand Experiences

Firms spend millions of euros on building their brand through advertising, site design, and online branding. Our heuristic evaluation of 16 large brands in the UK, however, reveals that only one brand creates a consistent experience across different media with a useful and usable Web site. Customer experience professionals must get basic site usability principles right before trying to differentiate through the online experience.

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July 12, 2007

Continued Innovation In Business Intelligence: Data Discovery Accelerators

Business intelligence (BI) has been around for a long time in one shape or form — as long as 30 years — but contrary to popular opinion, it's still not commoditizing. Even the data integration layer of the BI "stack," where most practitioners agree that some commoditization may be occurring, is experiencing a wave of innovation from a set of emerging vendors that provide automated data discovery or data discovery accelerators. Watch this important trend, as data discovery and integration are usually the most complex and resource-intensive parts of a typical BI initiative — and where many BI initiatives fail.

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