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Forrester: "Age of the Customer" Defines Business for Next 20 Years

In the "Age of the Customer", only organizations that focus first and foremost on winning, serving, and retaining customers will survive, according to Forrester. This era will define the next 20 years of business, with the marketing department gaining increased power over the overall success of a company.

But what happens to IT? As marketing takes greater ownership and responsibility for tech investments, its confidence in the technology management organization drops: Nearly one-third of marketers believe the technology management group actually hinders the business, according to new studies by Forrester.

Moreover, out of all business units, marketing is the most aggressive in planning to spend money on technology, increasing its "private" technology spending two to three times faster than IT overall.

Forrester VP and Research Director David Cooperstein says: "Executives who lead customer-obsessed enterprises must pull budget dollars from areas that traditionally created dominance — brand advertising, distribution lockup, mergers for scale, and supplier relationships."

According to the new research, they need to invest in four priority areas:

- Real-time actionable data sharing

- Contextualized customer experiences across touchpoints

- Sales efforts tied to buyers' processes

- Content-led marketing and customer interactions

Of equal importance is the role technology management groups play in retaining and serving customers. It is Forrester's contention that technology management splinters off into two vital agendas for the CIO.

"We believe that tech management must embrace two agendas: IT and BT," says Forrester CEO George F. Colony. "The CIO and team must continue to manage and improve IT (infrastructure) — the supply chains, financial systems, HR systems, and production systems that operate the corporation. But in addition, the team must take on the business technology (BT) agenda — building technologies, systems, and processes to win, retain, and serve customers. The CIO and team are best qualified to manage the complexity of emerging BT systems. As an example, systems of operation that contain critical customer data must be transformed to become agile systems of engagement capable of serving mobile customers with the right content, in the appropriate context, with the highest possible convenience."

According to the new research, BT investments must include key capabilities for four key imperatives:

- Engaging customers undergoing a mobile mind shift

- Providing superior customer experience in all customer interactions

- Understanding customers through big data and analytics

- Adapting to — and ideally driving — digital disruption

Can the CIO and CMO work hand in glove in the age of the customer? If they can't, it may well mean the death of well-established brands and companies we are all familiar with.

Related Links:

Forrester Report: Competitive Strategy In The Age Of The Customer

Forrester Report: Technology Management In The Age Of The Customer

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Forrester: "Age of the Customer" Defines Business for Next 20 Years

In the "Age of the Customer", only organizations that focus first and foremost on winning, serving, and retaining customers will survive, according to Forrester. This era will define the next 20 years of business, with the marketing department gaining increased power over the overall success of a company.

But what happens to IT? As marketing takes greater ownership and responsibility for tech investments, its confidence in the technology management organization drops: Nearly one-third of marketers believe the technology management group actually hinders the business, according to new studies by Forrester.

Moreover, out of all business units, marketing is the most aggressive in planning to spend money on technology, increasing its "private" technology spending two to three times faster than IT overall.

Forrester VP and Research Director David Cooperstein says: "Executives who lead customer-obsessed enterprises must pull budget dollars from areas that traditionally created dominance — brand advertising, distribution lockup, mergers for scale, and supplier relationships."

According to the new research, they need to invest in four priority areas:

- Real-time actionable data sharing

- Contextualized customer experiences across touchpoints

- Sales efforts tied to buyers' processes

- Content-led marketing and customer interactions

Of equal importance is the role technology management groups play in retaining and serving customers. It is Forrester's contention that technology management splinters off into two vital agendas for the CIO.

"We believe that tech management must embrace two agendas: IT and BT," says Forrester CEO George F. Colony. "The CIO and team must continue to manage and improve IT (infrastructure) — the supply chains, financial systems, HR systems, and production systems that operate the corporation. But in addition, the team must take on the business technology (BT) agenda — building technologies, systems, and processes to win, retain, and serve customers. The CIO and team are best qualified to manage the complexity of emerging BT systems. As an example, systems of operation that contain critical customer data must be transformed to become agile systems of engagement capable of serving mobile customers with the right content, in the appropriate context, with the highest possible convenience."

According to the new research, BT investments must include key capabilities for four key imperatives:

- Engaging customers undergoing a mobile mind shift

- Providing superior customer experience in all customer interactions

- Understanding customers through big data and analytics

- Adapting to — and ideally driving — digital disruption

Can the CIO and CMO work hand in glove in the age of the customer? If they can't, it may well mean the death of well-established brands and companies we are all familiar with.

Related Links:

Forrester Report: Competitive Strategy In The Age Of The Customer

Forrester Report: Technology Management In The Age Of The Customer

Hot Topics

The Latest

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...