Matthew Guarini

Facebook Has Brought Us To A Tipping Point Facebook is appointing what its leader calls a “supreme court” for resolving issues in content censorship. This oversight board will be appointed by Facebook; therefore, it is fraught with conflict of interest from the get-go. Consider that Facebook already has a bigger daily impact on the lives […]

CMOs Must Balance Technology And Creativity Spending Marketers are overfunding technology and underfunding creativity. Forrester forecasts that spending for adtech, martech, data, and analytics will grow between 9% and 11%, while spending for agencies will grow a mere 2.4%. Consequently, the experiences that marketers create are built on the same common technology platforms, solve the […]

FTD Bankruptcy A Lesson For Long-Standing Brands: Don’t Rest On Your Laurels When century-old floral stalwart FTD filed for Chapter 11, it sent shivers through C-suites of venerable brands everywhere. In a growing market, this pioneer should have dominated. It has long offered eCommerce and delivery, features that competitive direct-to-consumer (DTC) upstarts now use to […]

As The (Blockchain) World Turns: Part 1 A couple of announcements in particular this week served as a reminder that enterprises and vendors alike remain committed to leveraging distributed ledger technology (DLT). Proving the naysayers wrong, TradeLens (the IBM/Maersk global supply chain initiative) welcomed on board two further ocean carriers — CMA CGM and MSC […]

Facebook’s Planned “Coin” — Much Ado About We-Don’t-Know-What Given Facebook’s 2.4 billion monthly active users, any move the company makes is noteworthy. Put Facebook and cryptocurrency in the same sentence, and you’re guaranteed headlines. In reality, we still don’t know exactly what or when Facebook is planning to launch — possibly in early 2020 and […]

Even Big Digital Companies Need Little Humans . . . Lots Of Them Amazon offered $10,000 of startup capital and up to three months of pay to qualifying employees who quit . . . and go start a local last-mile delivery business. The eCommerce giant had previously invested in local delivery companies, seeding the creation […]

Having A Digital Ad Strategy Doesn’t Mean You’re Ready For This $100 Billion Market This week, the IAB announced that US digital ad spend topped $100 billion for the first time last year. We’re not surprised — our forecast predicts that by 2023, CMOs will spend nearly $150 billion on various digital marketing channels in […]

A Better Mousetrap Is Always Around The Corner The world saw cracks in the armor of Google this week when Alphabet’s earnings reported below analyst estimates. It looks like Amazon and others have found weaknesses in the search-based advertising model — golden geese are mortal, after all. So if Google is vulnerable to disruption, we all […]

We put ourselves to the test: Did our 2019 predictions for CIOs hit the mark?

A Tech-Driven Transformation Payoff In The Face Of Food Quality Issues Chipotle is in the midst of a food quality turnaround and a digital business transformation payoff. The company has invested in technology-driven innovation and an adaptive model leveraging point-of-service store systems, mobile ordering, food delivery (via DoorDash), and loyalty (a few months old and […]

Crisis Management Is Changing  Boeing’s having a tough run. The company is under intense scrutiny after two crashes involving its 737 MAX jets, with governments grounding planes globally. This isn’t the first time Boeing planes have crashed — but PR-wise, it’s the worst. What’s different serves as caution for all leaders, regardless of industry. The […]

Is There A Resurgence For The CIO Role? For years, the CIO role looked like it had been moving toward “chief infrastructure officer,” with many executives feeling like the transformative part of their job had been carved out and handed to chief digital officers. We have always been dubious that CDOs without deep technology expertise […]

Tech Sells, And Everyone Is Buying What do McDonald’s, Honda Motor Co., and Nike all have in common? These 50-year-old-plus global giants have all acquired small tech startups within the last year. McDonald’s just bought Dynamic Yield, an Israeli-based, AI-powered personalization tech company. Last month, Honda acquired a major stake in Ubitricity, a German-based maker […]

In less than seven weeks, we will descend on Chicago for Forrester’s Digital Transformation & Innovation 2019 Forum. Your competitors are delivering new products and services that continually raise the bar, so your imperative to transform is stronger than ever. But getting transformation right is essentially just table stakes; innovation really is the new imperative. […]

It’s Time To Start Talking About Professional Licensing For Software Engineers It wasn’t until enough boilers blew up that mechanical engineers had to get licensed. It wasn’t until bridges and buildings started collapsing that civil engineers and architects had to get licensed. Now that airplanes are falling out of the sky due to automation (AKA, […]

There Is A Tech Talent Gap . . . No Wait, There Isn’t  Tech talent continues to be one of the most common debates in the industry today. Conventional wisdom says that there is a critical imbalance in supply/demand, and data showing that there could be more than 1 million computer programming jobs unfilled by […]

Innovation, Schminnovation The Wall Street Journal recently published an op-ed titled “Beers, Bras and Brats.” This is a story about the perils of businesses that rest on their laurels. Brands such as Anheuser-Busch, Kraft Heinz, and Victoria’s Secret have enjoyed decades of success in their respective markets. But all of their stocks have dropped 30% […]

Are We Running Out Of Ideas? As the pace of disruption accelerates, there is an increasingly important focus being put on innovation. Now along comes some work published in the MIT Technology Review by economists from MIT, Harvard, and Boston University, “AI is reinventing the way we invent,” that highlights how the increasing amount of […]

A Road Map To Lose Your Technology Mandate CIOs have historically run technology innovation efforts, but that may be changing. We find CEOs understand that the future of their business depends on technology they don’t have or that hasn’t been invented yet. They recognize a need to spend at least part of their firm’s time […]