Digital Disruptions Complicate Digital Intelligence Needs

Digital intelligence (DI) — the practice of understanding and optimizing digital customer engagements — has been around for as long as the internet itself. But it has not remained stagnant. The practices and technologies needed to support DI have continued to be revolutionized by the digital disruption. And the number of means by which customers interact with a brand have skyrocketed in recent years, showing no signs of slowing down. In a recent press release, IHS Markit estimated that the number of internet-connected devices will grow to 125 billion by 2030, up from around 27 billion in 2017.

Understanding, and optimizing, digital customer engagement in today’s environment demands a dizzying combination of DI tech. Forrester recently analyzed the DI market to make sense of it. We published our findings in “The Forrester Tech Tide™: Digital Intelligence Technologies, Q1 2019.”

Seventeen Technologies Define The Digital Intelligence Tech Landscape

The Tech Tide report identified 17 categories of technologies, such as customer data platforms (CDPs), web analytics, and online testing. All categories directly support one or more essential DI capability. We assessed each technology across two dimensions:

  • Business value. When considering business value, Forrester determined and compared: the expected business ROI for each technology over the reasonable lifetime of the technology; the strategic value of each technology to help firms win, grow, and retain customers; and each technology’s level of impact on the business, as perceived by users, vendors, and other industry experts.
  • Maturity. This is the current state of the technology in the category, characterized by DI technology variables such as rate of product innovation; the nature of the dominant vendors in the market; current adoption by enterprise customers; rate of growth of adoption by enterprise customers; relative age of the technology category; and other relevant indicators of the readiness of the technology.

Using these metrics, we provide advice as to whether firms should experiment with, invest in, maintain, or divest from each DI technology category. “The Forrester Tech Tide™: Digital Intelligence Technologies, Q1 2019” is a vital asset to helping you evolve and sharpen your strategy and investment in DI technology.