Forrester: - Making Leaders Successful Every Day

Analyst's Photo	Name and Title	Contact information
	Ted Schadler Vice President, Principal Analyst

Research Coverage

Collaboration Platforms, Collaboration Strategy, Enterprise Collaboration, Information & Knowledge Management, Information Workplace, Instant Messaging, Messaging, Real-Time Collaboration, Unlock the value of content to make better business decisions, Web Conferencing

Research Focus

Ted serves Content & Collaboration Professionals. Ted has 24 years of experience in the technology industry, focusing on the effects of disruptive technologies on the workforce and workforce productivity. His research focuses on workforce technologies and the programs that support them, including instant messaging, web conferencing, and unified communications; smartphones and tablets and their impact on productivity; telework and consumer broadband; cloud email and collaboration tools; and the consumerization of IT. Ted has more than 10 years of experience as a quantitative analyst using survey techniques to help clients define their workforce personas and conduct workforce technology assessments.

Ted is the co-author of 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 and business, companies must empower their employees to directly engage with and solve the problems of empowered customers using these same technologies.

It is through this empowered lens that the "consumerization of IT" makes sense: employees solving customer and business problems using readily available technology that they master first at home — social, mobile, video, and cloud. This management book helps CIOs and IT organizations engage directly with business managers and employees to build an empowered strategy: understanding which employees are workforce "HEROes" — highly empowered and resourceful operatives, implementing empowering collaboration and innovation programs, creating a new empowered security architecture, and supporting HEROes with the right technology platforms.

In 2009, Ted launched Forrester's Workforce Technology Assessment, the industry's first benchmark survey of workforce technology adoption. This quantitative approach helps Content & Collaboration professionals and the teams they work with have a fact-based conversation about employees’ technology adoption and requirements. Forrester now collects workforce technology data in five countries.

Ted's previous experience in 13 years at Forrester includes two years as vice president of Forrester's Consumer Technographics® business; two years as a vice president and principal analyst focused on consumer devices; and seven years as an enterprise software analyst and research director, including two years as the founding product manager and research group director for TechRankings, the forerunner of the Forrester Wave™ methodology.

Ted has appeared as a technology industry expert on ABC, CBC, CNBC, NBC, and PBS and has been quoted in publications such as BusinessWeek, The Economist, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

Previous Work Experience

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 was a singer and bass player for Crash Davenport, a successful Maryland-based rock-and-roll band.

Education

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.

Latest Research

Planned Research