Britt Technology Impact Series

You are empowered, and so are the vast majority of consumers in the developed and metropolitan world. Indian consumers buy, pay, and take delivery of cars from their smartphones. American consumers are more likely to book flights, pay bills, and choose most products online than in any other way. Business customers are equally empowered: demanding help in their mobile moments of need. Empowered consumers and business customers disrupt every industry and market as their demand for digital products and services ripples through the retail channel, innovation process, supply pipelines, and core capabilities of every company. In this session, Ted Schadler, Forrester Research Vice President and coauthor of The Mobile Mind Shift and Empowered, discussed best practices of startups and enterprise to win in the age of the customer.

Ted Schadler serves Application Development & Delivery Professionals. He has 27 years of experience in the technology industry, focusing on the effects of disruptive technologies on people and on businesses. His current research agenda analyzes the expanding role of content and content delivery in a mobile-first, digital-always world, including the effects on web content management and digital experience delivery platforms.

Ted is the coauthor of The Mobile Mind Shift: Engineer Your Business to Win in the Mobile Moment (Groundswell Press, June 2014). Your customers now turn to their smartphones for everything. What’s tomorrow’s weather? Is the flight on time? Where’s the nearest store, and is this product cheaper there? Whatever the question, the answer is on the phone. This Pavlovian response is the mobile mind shift — the expectation that I can get what I want, anytime, in my immediate context. Your new battleground for customers is this mobile moment — the instant in which your customer is seeking an answer. If you’re there for them, they’ll love you; if you’re not, you’ll lose their business. Both entrepreneurial companies like Dropbox and huge corporations like Nestlé are winning in that mobile moment. Are you?

Ted coauthored Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business (Harvard Business Review Press, September 2010). Social, mobile, video, and cloud Internet services give consumers and business customers more information power than ever before. To win customer trust, companies must empower their employees to directly engage with customers using these same technologies.

Previously, Ted analyzed the consumerization of IT and its impact on a mobile-first workforce, the future of file services in a mobile-first, cloud-enabled world, mobile collaboration tools, workforce technology adoption and use, and the rise of cognitive computing. In 2009, Ted launched Forrester’s Workforce Technology Assessment, the industry’s first benchmark survey of workforce technology adoption. This quantitative approach helps professionals and the teams they work with have a fact-based conversation about employees’ technology adoption.

Prior to joining Forrester in April 1997, Ted was a cofounder of Phios, an MIT spinoff. Before that, Ted worked for eight years as CTO and director of engineering for a software company serving the healthcare industry. Early in his career, Ted sang and played bass for Crash Davenport, a successful Maryland-based rock-and-roll band.

Ted has a master’s degree in management from the MIT Sloan School of Management. He also holds an M.S. in computer science from the University of Maryland and a B.A. with honors in physics from Swarthmore College.

Read more insights in Ted’s Blog.