40+ Years Of Bold

Forrester introduces its high-performance IT research to help companies drive growth and gain efficiencies by aligning technology capabilities with their unique business needs.

To celebrate our 40th anniversary, we kick off a worldwide effort to support organizations focused on food insecurity. Hundreds of employees in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific sort, pack, and distribute food, and many contributed funds to those organizations.

CEO George Colony issues a clarion call for companies to explore generative AI, predicting its widespread transformational impact. Forrester began writing on the impact of this type of technology years earlier — for instance, through our research on “TuringBots” that will learn to code enterprise applications.

Forrester announces its inaugural global Customer Obsession Awards to recognize companies and senior executives who center all that they do on customers. The award is given in two categories: Customer-Obsessed Enterprise and Customer-Obsessed Leadership.

To help business, marketing, and technology leaders capitalize on the historic business opportunity that sustainability presents, we launch our Green Market Revolution research, which we continue to actively build upon.

We announce our Forrester Decisions for Digital Business & Strategy research service to help digital leaders create and deliver businesswide digital strategies to boost customer acquisition and profitability.

The White House begins using Forrester’s Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) to publicly evaluate its customer experience efforts. Forrester is the only provider of a tool that captures perceptions of the quality of experiences citizens have with the federal government. The President’s Management Agenda directly references the federal government’s use of the CX Index as a benchmarking tool and tracks its performance on the index.

To help B2B companies accelerate revenue growth, we unveil our B2B Revenue Waterfall™ at B2B Summit North America. The B2B Revenue Waterfall is the latest iteration of the highly influential SiriusDecisions Demand Unit Waterfall®, which helped cement the concept of “buying groups” into the B2B collective consciousness.

Shortly into a global pandemic, we pivot to virtual events, beginning with CX Sydney and followed closely by B2B Summit North America and CX North America. We hold a total of nine successful virtual events in 2020, defying expectations of what’s possible.

Forrester joins forces with SiriusDecisions in our largest acquisition to date. The acquisition adds a powerful dimension to our offerings, combining forward-looking research with actionable tools and frameworks to operationalize the insights.

Recognizing that “technology and economic forces have changed the world to such a great extent that an obsession with winning, serving, and retaining customers is the only possible response,” we release our report, “The Operating Model For Customer Obsession.” The report, based on an analysis of over 30 companies at various stages in their customer-obsessed transformations, details the fundamental reset of day-to-day operations needed to drive customer obsession. The report has become the bedrock of our customer-obsession guidance to clients.

We move in to our current corporate headquarters, a LEED-Green-certified building at Cambridge Discovery Park. At 190,000 square feet and home to 500 employees, it is a mere two miles, but light-years away, from George Colony’s first basement home office.

Our report “Competitive Strategy In The Age Of The Customer” heralds a new era in business. While previous eras were defined by expertise in manufacturing, distribution, or information, “the new power of customers means that a focus on the customer now matters more than any other strategic imperative,” the report notes.

The acquisition of Singapore-based Springboard Research bolsters Forrester’s presence in the Asia Pacific region and advances our commitment to serving tech industry leaders.

The acquisition of JupiterResearch bolsters our offerings for marketing and strategy professionals. Through the acquisition, Forrester gained “some of the most prominent and prolific voices in the analysis of social media and technology’s effects on consumers,” wrote Forrester alum Cliff Condon.

Our first Customer Experience Index (today often shortened to CX Index™) is published. For our first index, we asked nearly 5,000 consumers about their interactions with a range of companies, gauging the usefulness, usability, and enjoyment of those experiences. The index methodology has since evolved; today’s methodology is reflected in the graphic above.

Forrester acquires the global technology advisory firm Giga Information Group, complementing Forrester’s emerging tech expertise. Employees who came from the acquisition are still with Forrester today.

We foresee a large-scale movement of US services industry jobs to other countries as companies look to lower their costs. Our research brief, headlined “3.3 Million US Services Jobs To Go Offshore,” garners significant media attention — so much so that in 2004, report author John McCarthy revises his projections upward and notes that widespread publicity over the cost savings linked to offshoring may have hastened the trend.

The launch of Business Technographics® enables us to equip our clients with data-driven insights to understand the changing B2B tech buyer.

We launch our consulting practice, the most personalized way clients can apply Forrester’s deep body of research, data-driven insights, and best practices to their business challenges.

Our report “The Demise Of Dot-Com Retailers” foresees the impending dot-com crash. The report accurately predicts that many dot-coms are in weak positions and that many won’t survive the year.

We announce our initial public offering of 2.3 million shares.

Two particularly prescient reports provide a glimpse into the future: “The New Public Internet” predicts that the internet will become a household tool, while “Defining Social Computing” foresees a technology-enabled future in which “people will converse more broadly, electronic ‘communities’ will be created, and text, pictures, and sounds will be woven into conversations.” Soon after, we created a New Media Research group to analyze website operations and new internet-based technologies.

We predict the fall of the mainframe and the rise of PC-based client/server computer systems. Our prescience around client/server computing — which we defined as “desktop computers cooperating with computers known as servers to do a job” — boosted Forrester’s profile and authority as the trend took off in the 1990s.