Forrester

Let’s face it: As a US government leader, you are facing unprecedented change. The speed, depth, and widespread nature of the current change in the US government is dramatic, and you are uniquely challenged at this moment in helping your people stay engaged to deliver great outcomes while under significant mental stress. Our research shows that government workers who see how their work contributes to their organization’s overall success are four times more likely to put effort into their growth and development. They’re also three times more likely to be productive at work than those who do not see how their work contributes. Consider further that 41% of employees who remain after a layoff experience a 36% decline in organizational commitment and a 20% decline in job performance. When you pair both factors together, it is easy to see the importance of keeping your employees engaged and connected to their work after a layoff, when motivation is a challenge. Even if it is a deliberate strategy by executive leadership to further reduce headcount in response to continued uncertainty, you, as the directly aligned manager of your people, need to assume that they will stay for the long term. Forrester can help you navigate this uncertainty with some practical guidance. Go Beyond Surface-Level Conversations And Tactics This is not a time for leaning too heavily on team lunches, “How are you?” statements in a one-on-one, or other surface-level approaches. Colleagues losing their jobs around you can trigger deeply rooted psychological fears and emotions. Consider that many of your employees might be the sole or primary earner of a household. Many may be concerned about feeding their family if they are “next.” How do you, as their leader, respond to this moment of strong emotion? You respond by leaning into it and doing the uncomfortable work of connecting with your people on a deeper level: Open the door to deep sharing of how your people are feeling by telling a relatable story from your past (along with how you currently feel about the environment). Share the immense impact it had on you, how you navigated it, and what the end result was. If you do not have this story or are uncomfortable with this approach, find someone in your network who is willing and ensure that this employee is fully open to this type of dialogue before beginning. Focus on what you can control by continuing the dialog. Stay committed to it; not every conversation needs to be deep and painful, but your employees should know that this door is always open to them. Check in on them regularly after your initial deep work to let them know that you are there for them any time they need. As with any organizational change, you cannot control every variable. Focus on what you can control with your teams to stay focused on the task at hand. Delivering outcomes while change swirls around you will build resilience both within your team and in yourself as a leader. After you cover the personal side of the conversation, keep a sharp focus on how their work drives meaningful outcomes for overall goals. Make a plan that establishes a strong and purposeful line of communication between you and your team. Employees who have a strong understanding of how their work ties to organizational goals are much more likely to deliver strong results because they can see a tangible impact. Failure to establish this linkage will result in a precipitous decline in results. Do Not Forget To Practice Self-Care It is imperative as a leader to routinely practice self-care. If you are not in the best mental state, you will not be able to optimally support your employees and the aforementioned tactics will not succeed at achieving high engagement in your teams. Self-care takes many forms and is highly individualized. Some people exercise, read, or sit on a riding lawn mower for 3 hours. Our guidance is to deploy any techniques that bring about mental calm and help reduce stressors so that you can bring absolute clarity to supporting your teams. Effective self-care mindfulness routines have been found to moderately reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression, two very common conditions experienced during times of stress such as a period of layoffs. Don’t make the mistake of believing that the highly productive people you are relying on to steer your ship in a new direction aren’t also burning out. Our research finds that employees can be both burning out and highly engaged — and this includes you. As a leader, practice what you preach. Leverage the power of storytelling to share what you are doing to manage your emotions during these difficult times. It is easy to avoid these difficult topics and stay focused on the day’s tasks. To be truly effective as a change leader, we urge you to lean heavily into the challenge — for yourself and your people. If you want to dig deeper into managing change in these unprecedented times, please reach out to us by scheduling a guidance session or an inquiry via email: . source

San Jose was abuzz with excitement as AI enthusiasts gathered for the 2025 NVIDIA GTC AI conference. NVIDIA showcased its expanding data center offerings, along with a commitment to joint developments with server and network vendors. Everyone had high expectations, as this is a world-renowned AI infrastructure event, and this year, it did not disappoint. Sovereign AI led off the agenda, with UK Secretary of State for Science, Innovation, and Technology Peter Kyle highlighting the UK’s ambitious AI strategy and representatives from Denmark, India, Italy, South Korea, and Brazil also sharing their sovereign AI initiatives. Italy’s Colosseum and Brazil’s WideLabs stood out as prime examples of innovative international AI applications. Another highlight was the collaboration between DeepMind and Disney Research that demonstrated AI’s potential to revolutionize fields such as robotics, drug discovery, and energy grids, along with the introduction of Dynamo, both as an open-source project and a framework for NVIDIA’s hardware, which promises to accelerate industrywide advancements in AI infrastructure. GTC also brought forward NVIDIA’s news of the disaggregation of NVLink, partnerships with Cisco for future telecommunications, and the expansion of its hardware certification program. Here’s a roundup of some of the most notable announcements: Vera Rubin and Rubin Ultra. Jensen Huang introduced the Vera Rubin architecture, named after astronomer Vera Rubin. This next-generation GPU, launching in 2026, is designed to significantly enhance system performance. Rubin Ultra, expected in 2027, will further boost these capabilities. Disaggregated NVLink. NVIDIA’s NVLink72 is an advanced interconnect architecture that facilitates ultra high-speed communication between GPUs and CPUs in large-scale computing setups. It connects 72 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs and 36 NVIDIA Grace CPUs within a single rack, enabling them to function as a unified, massive computational resource. Partnerships with Cisco. NVIDIA and Cisco are collaborating to develop an AI-native wireless network stack, focusing on radio access networks for 6G technology. This partnership focuses on performance, efficiency, and scalability in telecommunications. Expanded certification program. NVIDIA’s certification program validates servers equipped with NVIDIA GPUs to handle diverse AI workloads, including deep learning training and inference tasks. The rigorous testing ensures optimal performance, manageability, and scalability. Systems from Dell Technologies, HPE, and storage providers like NetApp and VAST Data have achieved NVIDIA-certified status. AI Data Center Blueprint. Recognizing the unique requirements of AI data centers, NVIDIA is partnering with vendors like Cadence, Vertiv, and Schneider to develop AI Factory Blueprints. These blueprints streamline the design, testing, and optimization of AI data centers, creating visual models to simulate and refine aspects such as power, cooling, and networking before construction, ensuring efficiency and reliability. Dynamo. NVIDIA released Dynamo, an open-source framework for scalable model inferencing. Although not every organization will be inferencing models directly on their own hardware, NVIDIA aspires to become to AI what Kubernetes is to cloud. Cohere is an early explorer of this project. Some more tactical updates: CUDA-X libraries. Powered by GH200 and GB200 superchips, these libraries accelerate computational engineering tools by up to 11x and enable 5x larger calculations. With over 400 libraries, key microservices include NVIDIA Riva for speech AI, Earth-2 for climate simulations, cuOpt for routing optimization, and NeMo Retriever for retrieval-augmented generation capabilities. NVIDIA Llama Nemotron reasoning. This feature enhances multistep math, coding, reasoning, and complex decision-making with Llama models. It boosts accuracy by 20% and optimizes inference speed by 5x, reducing operational costs. NVIDIA Cosmos World Foundation Models (WFMs). WFMs introduce customizable reasoning models for physical AI. Cosmos Transfer WFMs generate controllable photorealistic video outputs from structured video inputs, streamlining perception AI training. NVIDIA Isaac GR00T N1. New models GROOT and Newton accelerate reliable robot deployment across various industries, using real and synthetic training data. These are enhanced by the latest Cosmos WFM. As firms build agentic AI, the need for optimized hardware to run inferencing reasoning models becomes ever more critical. Targeted inferencing frameworks such as NVIDIA’s Dynamo that are released as open-source projects are very valuable for the early movers of the agentic world, allowing for broader community co-innovation. What It Means NVIDIA is driving a vertical integration story based on its prowess in AI hardware and is now extending this to libraries, open–source AI models (generic and industry-specific), edge, and robotics. This certainly is good news for organizations (the idea of a one-stop shop), but business and tech leaders must address challenges extraneous to their NVIDIA relationship, such as export controls, trade sanctions that limit infrastructure availability, power requirements, business cases for AI, skills, cost increases, and risks including security, privacy, and compliance. Specifically, power requirements for AI ambitions remains an ongoing challenge. Jensen Huang talked about how AWS, Azure, GCP, and Oracle Cloud will procure nearly 3.6 million Blackwell GPUs in 2025. In another session, Schneider execs talked about additional 150-gigawatt capacity requirements now through 2030. For reference, one rack full of NVIDIA Blackwell servers with NVLink72 requires approximately 150+ kilowatt power (compared to 10–30 kWs for traditional systems). These massive deployments across the globe require thinking outside of the box to make it all sustainable. We are looking forward to publishing a few research reports on this market very soon. If you’re exploring AI potential and want to discuss it further, please submit an inquiry request. source

GenAI Mirrors Search Experiences Because of generative AI (genAI), all search experiences are increasingly conversational, assistive, and agentic. Consequently, distinctions between search experiences disappear. Perplexity and Rufus, Amazon’s shopping assistant, both leverage genAI-integrated search, blurring the line between search engine and site search experiences. Like Rufus, Perplexity’s shopping assistant rapidly summarizes reviews, compares features, and requires only one click to buy. Similarly, Adobe’s Acrobat AI Assistant, an example of cognitive search, facilitates conversations with PDFs and summarizes documents. This is similar to Leo, an AI assistant developed by private search engine Brave, which analyzes PDFs and Google Docs. Suddenly, search engine and cognitive search experiences look and feel alike. Examples abound of genAI-induced search convergence. Experiences like ChatGPT Tasks, Quora’s Poe, Reddit Answers, Salesforce’s Agentforce, ThredUp’s Style Chat, Workday Assistant, and more have much in common. Together, they form and reflect powerfully evolving search behavior. Now, users expect back-and-forth interactions with agents that act like personal assistants and, increasingly, act on users’ behalf. GenAI Minimizes Searchers’ Time To Value The convenience of genAI-integrated search experiences motivates mass adoption. Already, 37% of consumers use conversational search features whenever they can, according to a recent survey of Forrester’s Market Research Online Community. Such features replace the friction of clicks with the intuition of conversations and demand less effort. For example, when planning a trip, Google’s Gemini can let you know the best time to book flights, advise how to save money on hotels, create a trip planning document, draft a packing list, and check Gmail for confirmation codes. Microsoft’s Copilot can create a meal plan in seconds customized to your age by retrieving information from various sites. GenAI Demands Holistic Search As search experiences across engines, sites, and databases converge, silos between search marketing, commerce search, and cognitive search dissolve. Search-related tasks that once occurred in isolation — such as bid management for pay-per-click, log file analysis for search engine optimization, enhancing product metadata for commerce search, and synthesizing customer service answers for cognitive search — can now cross-pollinate in a holistic search strategy. Holistic search entails incrementality testing to mitigate keyword cannibalization, creating cross-functional testbeds for new search strategies and tactics, and listening more actively to customers’ voices. It means measuring search engine results page saturation, addressing websites’ existential crises, adopting commerce search, and investing in vector search. Our latest report — GenAI Forever Changes All Forms Of Search — details how to do all that and more. It’s a first-of-its-kind collaboration across Forrester’s B2C marketing, B2B marketing, commerce search, and cognitive search subject-matter experts. We look forward to your feedback and helping marketing, digital, and technology leaders and processes adapt to genAI-integrated search. As always, feel free to contact us to learn more. source

Prioritize Foundational Elements Over Decorative Accessories Our springtime urge to clean, redecorate, and renovate has a biological explanation. Turns out that spring’s increased hours of daylight lower our body’s production of melatonin (the hormone that makes you sleepy), which leads to regained energy and inspiration to clean our living environments. For security and risk pros, what better way to use that energy than to give your third-party risk management (TPRM) program a good spring cleaning?! Whether your TPRM program needs some sprucing up or a complete renovation, my new report, How To Build The Foundation For An Effective Third-Party Risk Management Program, takes you through the steps to get there. Follow These Steps To Spruce Up Your TPRM Program Like A Pro These days, there’s no shortage of foolproof, celebrity-endorsed checklists to make your home deep-clean a breeze but none (that I could find) for tidying up your TPRM house. Putting my Home Network show obsession to good use, I created a TPRM spring cleaning checklist. To refresh third-party risk without getting overwhelmed: Focus on the foundational elements. Before you clean indoors, experts recommend focusing on the structural elements such as gutters, air ducts, and roofing. These areas are far less costly when maintenance is routine. Similarly, the third-party ecosystem is foundational to your company’s business strategy and requires the same preventive maintenance. Breaches, attacks, and disruptions are no different than the leaks from clogged gutters, fires from blocked air ducts, and structural damage from a failing roof. If third-party risk is not a risk managemnet priority or low on the list, prepare for disaster, not inconvenience. Foundational to your TPRM program are things such as organizationwide nomenclature and what third parties are in versus out of scope. Prioritize visibility. A thorough window washing is synonymous with spring cleaning. Beyond the curb appeal, the process allows you to check that hinges are operational, check for air and water leaks, and remove dirt to improve the air quality and energy efficiency. Data is the window into your third parties: The better the quality and the more complete it is, the better your visibility is into the risk. The good news is that you are likely to have more TPRM data than you know and often enough to get your program started — if you know where to look. To build a holistic view of third-party risk, partner with colleagues in sourcing, procurement, contract management, and business users. Tackle overlooked surfaces. Spring cleaning is often when we move the furniture instead of cleaning around it and finally address those “forgotten” spots such as baseboards, light fixtures, and curtains. The surfaces are either out of the way or take too much effort to address regularly. In TPRM, tiering, segmentation, and risk scoring are those overlooked surfaces. We’re so focused on keeping up with the volume of third parties that there’s no time to reevaluate whether our tiering and segmentation aligns to business strategy and our scoring model matches our risk management maturity. Third-Party Risk Doesn’t Have To Be A Business Blind Spot Third-party risk is a rapidly maturing discipline where yesterday’s requirements can quickly become insufficient. As technology, business dynamics, and the threat landscape all change, make sure your TPRM program keeps pace. Read the full report for a step-by-step guide to building the foundation for an effective TPRM program, and schedule an inquiry or guidance session with me for further insights. source

I recently attended my first-ever Insider Summit (formerly the Insider Threat Summit) in Monterey, California. The event, in its ninth year, was attended by insider risk leaders, counterintelligence professionals, and current/former members of law enforcement and the US military. The heavy focus on people — not data or systems — was surprising to me. More specifically, there was an emphasis on addressing “the whole person” and focusing on employee wellness. This underscores for me that insider risk is very much a human problem, not a technology problem, which doesn’t mean that technology does not help address human problems but rather that technology can only identify — not prevent — the symptoms of a person who is headed down the critical path leading to an insider incident. As Dr. Amanda Najjar pointed out during her talk, “We are all capable of becoming insider threats.” Several speakers covered topics such as employee wellness and safety, which are key to reducing insider risk. Stressed users, after all, are risky users, as they are more likely to make mistakes, act maliciously, and succumb to external coercion. The impact of geopolitics and state actors was another prevalent topic. Insiders are a constant target of state actors, and the volatile geopolitical environment is increasing that risk. Nations are looking for ways to gain an advantage and to acquire valuable intellectual property, and they are aggressively targeting insiders in their pursuits. One topic in particular caught me off guard: suicide. One of the speakers, Dr. Deanna Caputo of MITRE, discussed suicide and the insider risk team’s ability to identify users at risk of suicide. She made the point that “suicide is an insider threat” because of its impact not only on the individual but the whole organization. While the insider risk team isn’t directly responsible for monitoring for mental health or suicide risk, the tools and techniques that insider risk pros use might be useful for picking up clues that certain users are at risk or may be at risk of external adversaries targeting them. My own talk focused on how insider risk and data security can work more closely together to guard against insider data exfiltration. Forrester Principal Analyst Heidi Shey and I codeveloped this approach for last year’s Security & Risk Summit. While insider risk teams focus on detecting and investigating insider incidents, data security teams focus on preventing data breaches. When the two teams collaborate, they can share information about the data at risk, the riskiness of individual users, and how insiders are trying to exfiltrate data. This “data intelligence cycle” creates a continuous feedback loop where insider risk and data security pros learn from each other and collaborate to stop data exfiltration. Heidi and I plan to publish this research later in the year. Let’s Connect Forrester clients can schedule an inquiry or guidance session with me to do a deeper dive on insider risk and learn how to start their own insider risk management program. source

Today at Forrester’s largest annual customer event in Phoenix, my colleague Barry Vasudevan opened B2B Summit North America with his keynote address, “Introducing Buying Networks: Your Buyers’ New Reality,” which introduced the new concept of buying networks. This wasn’t an easy narrative to deliver, because there are a significant number of challenging and hard-to-stomach realities in B2B today that compel us all to acknowledge that much about how we’ve sold in the past won’t work in the future. This in turn means that revenue enablement teams need to start pivoting — now — or risk irrelevance. Let’s first review some of Barry’s tough-love findings. The Bad News About Buyers Barry told us that “a seemingly never-ending list of people, processes, and technologies involved in making a purchase decision has radically transformed the landscape of business buying.” The hard facts about B2B buyers boil down to the following: Buyers hate buying 81% of buyers are dissatisfied … with the winning provider. Buyers are growing far more complex The average B2B sale now involves 13 internal and 9 external individuals. Buyers are taking longer to buy 86% of purchases experience a significant stall. Buyers are relying on the direct provider less than ever 28% of purchases already include 10+ external influencers. Buyers are using genAI to change everything 89% of buyers are using generative AI agents to support their purchase.   Not very uplifting, is it? But wait, there’s more …  The More Troubling News About Providers Marketing and sales teams within B2B companies remain extraordinarily inward-focused, relying on historically successful or traditional mechanics that fail to address modern realities: Providers focus on revenue growth at the expense of customer goals Only 3% of B2B companies are legitimately customer-obsessed. Providers are losing ground to buyer self-service The self-service technology market size is projected to double by 2032. Providers misalign incentives and behaviors The average conversion ratio from target stage to qualified stage is less than 5%. Providers are not trusted Buyers rank salespeople ninth out of 12 trust options — only ahead of news media, government officials, and social media influencers. Providers rely on archaic processes and metrics B2B CMO dashboards focus on an average of nine organizational value metrics and only two customer value metrics.   All is not lost, however. Barry provided several examples of revenue process transformation success stories, because after all, “big problems require bold solutions.” It starts with graduating the provider organization’s mindset “from checkers to chess.” We must all better respond to the buyer’s needs, their expanding networks, and use of technology with better abilities to collect and interpret signals, maneuver through the buying ecosystem, and acknowledge that outside-in revenue generation approaches override our internal org charts, fiefdoms, and vanity metrics. How Revenue Enablement Can React Today My favorite quote stemming from Barry’s current work is this: “To maximize the lifetime value of the customer, organizations need to maximize lifetime value for the customer,” says Mike Randall, head of global demand generation at Jones Lang LaSalle. Your revenue enablement team can immediately start shifting to a more customer-obsessed mindset by: Cleansing all traditional enablement materials — onboarding curricula, product launch training, methodology reminders — of “What’s in it for me?”-like, “It’s all about us and our products” content. Replace all the self-congratulatory and product-centric enablement references with buyers, personas, markets, business savvy, and whatever else it takes to fulfill Randall’s vision. Reviewing the plans for all upcoming spiffs, SKOs, QBRs, blitz days, and contests to identify recurring mistakes. Are you rewarding seller activity instead of genuine buyer interest? Are you working harder to acquire new logos instead of working smarter to secure renewals? Refining all enablement materials about buyer personas and trends to reflect the realities of their generative AI usage. Sellers can’t and shouldn’t compete with machines but need to be experts on how their buyers are leveraging AI to bypass human interactions … for when they do get in front of their prospect. What Revenue Enablement Must Prepare For Tomorrow Forrester also quotes Ali Rastiello, VP of revenue operations at Health Catalyst: “When my company evaluated offerings from two leading vendors, we chose the provider that demonstrated time after time that they knew who we were and what we wanted to achieve.” This informs my sole, focused recommendation for enablement leaders hoping to support the rise of buying networks: Double down on evolving your seller competencies to adapt to changing buyer needs. Pushing an RDR to make 100 dials per day should give way to hiring, onboarding, and everboarding reps with higher emotional inteligence, a stronger ability to identify and navigate buyer networks, and, above all, an understanding of how to earn customer trust. source

Let’s face it: As a US government leader, you are facing unprecedented change. The speed, depth, and widespread nature of the current change in the US government is dramatic, and you are uniquely challenged at this moment in helping your people stay engaged to deliver great outcomes while under significant mental stress. Our research shows that government workers who see how their work contributes to their organization’s overall success are four times more likely to put effort into their growth and development. They’re also three times more likely to be productive at work than those who do not see how their work contributes. Consider further that 41% of employees who remain after a layoff experience a 36% decline in organizational commitment and a 20% decline in job performance. When you pair both factors together, it is easy to see the importance of keeping your employees engaged and connected to their work after a layoff, when motivation is a challenge. Even if it is a deliberate strategy by executive leadership to further reduce headcount in response to continued uncertainty, you, as the directly aligned manager of your people, need to assume that they will stay for the long term. Forrester can help you navigate this uncertainty with some practical guidance. Go Beyond Surface-Level Conversations And Tactics This is not a time for leaning too heavily on team lunches, “How are you?” statements in a one-on-one, or other surface-level approaches. Colleagues losing their jobs around you can trigger deeply rooted psychological fears and emotions. Consider that many of your employees might be the sole or primary earner of a household. Many may be concerned about feeding their family if they are “next.” How do you, as their leader, respond to this moment of strong emotion? You respond by leaning into it and doing the uncomfortable work of connecting with your people on a deeper level: Open the door to deep sharing of how your people are feeling by telling a relatable story from your past (along with how you currently feel about the environment). Share the immense impact it had on you, how you navigated it, and what the end result was. If you do not have this story or are uncomfortable with this approach, find someone in your network who is willing and ensure that this employee is fully open to this type of dialogue before beginning. Focus on what you can control by continuing the dialog. Stay committed to it; not every conversation needs to be deep and painful, but your employees should know that this door is always open to them. Check in on them regularly after your initial deep work to let them know that you are there for them any time they need. As with any organizational change, you cannot control every variable. Focus on what you can control with your teams to stay focused on the task at hand. Delivering outcomes while change swirls around you will build resilience both within your team and in yourself as a leader. After you cover the personal side of the conversation, keep a sharp focus on how their work drives meaningful outcomes for overall goals. Make a plan that establishes a strong and purposeful line of communication between you and your team. Employees who have a strong understanding of how their work ties to organizational goals are much more likely to deliver strong results because they can see a tangible impact. Failure to establish this linkage will result in a precipitous decline in results. Do Not Forget To Practice Self-Care It is imperative as a leader to routinely practice self-care. If you are not in the best mental state, you will not be able to optimally support your employees and the aforementioned tactics will not succeed at achieving high engagement in your teams. Self-care takes many forms and is highly individualized. Some people exercise, read, or sit on a riding lawn mower for 3 hours. Our guidance is to deploy any techniques that bring about mental calm and help reduce stressors so that you can bring absolute clarity to supporting your teams. Effective self-care mindfulness routines have been found to moderately reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression, two very common conditions experienced during times of stress such as a period of layoffs. Don’t make the mistake of believing that the highly productive people you are relying on to steer your ship in a new direction aren’t also burning out. Our research finds that employees can be both burning out and highly engaged — and this includes you. As a leader, practice what you preach. Leverage the power of storytelling to share what you are doing to manage your emotions during these difficult times. It is easy to avoid these difficult topics and stay focused on the day’s tasks. To be truly effective as a change leader, we urge you to lean heavily into the challenge — for yourself and your people. If you want to dig deeper into managing change in these unprecedented times, please reach out to us by scheduling a guidance session or an inquiry via email: . source

The number of people with disabilities is about 16% of the overall population. This is a billion-customer opportunity. Software that is not written with the needs of people with visual, auditory, motor, and cognitive disabilities in mind blocks potential and current customers from using your products and services. Imagine what you would do to get 1.3 billion more customers … and if that’s not a compelling reason, how about the fact that, as of June 2025 under the European Accessibility Act, the EU will require covered software to be compliant with the EN 301 549 standard or face fines. This is a moment similar to when GDPR arrived, only aimed this time at ensuring that all people can access software in an accommodating manner. Accessibility In Software Is A Repeat Of DevSecOps Most development shops think about accessibility later in the development process — for example, by requesting an audit after the product is complete and in production. Sound familiar? It should, because it’s the same broken process that most DevOps shops went through when they began facing security requirements. Developers would write insecure code, they would send it to a security expert, that security expert would review and send back suggestions, the developer would rewrite the code, and the endless loop would carry all the way into production (where the very last stage was penetration testing). Most DevOps shops have moved on from those dark days and now embrace DevSecOps, the practice of developers writing secure code from the beginning, bolstered by static code analysis tools that can uncover security issues as soon as code is written. Accessibility testing offers the same potential for saving development time, improving time to market, and reducing the overall cost of delivering quality software that is accessible to all. Accessibility Testing Is Just Another Form Of Shift-Left In The DevOps Lifecycle Several vendors support static code analysis tools for accessibility. These tools can help developers uncover and fix accessibility issues early in the coding phase. It’s the same form of shift-left that DevOps engineers have been practicing with unit testing, functional testing, security testing, and performance testing. Accessibility testing is just another form of quality that fits directly into the shift-left paradigm. Shifting-left accessibility encourages you to: Establish a foundation of awareness and empathy. Make the business case for accessibility so that IT leadership and all developers understand why it’s imperative for the organization to create accessible experiences. At the same time, bring accessibility to life by highlighting the human impact. Bring forward stories of customers who have been shut out by inaccessible experiences. Demonstrate what it’s like to use your software today with assistive technologies like screen readers. Once developers understand that the software is essentially “broken” for those users, it’s hard to unsee that. Embed accessibility into component libraires. Make it easier for developers to build accessible experiences by ensuring that they’re working from accessible-ready building blocks. Double-check that components adhere to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Enable developers with tools to test for accessibility. Teach developers how to test their code for common accessibility barriers using free tools such as the axe DevTools Chrome extension. Longer term, invest in a digital accessibility platform with deeper capabilities for embedding accessibility into each phase of development and make it part of your everyday development process by building automated linkages between DevOps tool chains and internal developer portals. Let’s Connect If you’re a client and would like to ask us questions or discuss how to embed accessibility into development at your organization, set up a conversation with us. source

Brand safety commonly refers to advertising and content adjacency in the digital space. And while that is a vital component for protecting a brand’s reputation, digital content adjacency isn’t the only adjacency that threatens a brand. Forrester’s 2024 B2B Brand And Communications Survey suggests we’ve reached a new tipping point, with 58% of B2B marketing leaders now saying their organization has a view of brand safety that goes well beyond advertising and includes how they form partnerships, choose suppliers, and make business decisions. A Broader View Of Brand Safety Companies’ reputations don’t just exist online and through their digital activities; they exist across every experience throughout the business ecosystem. Marketers should look at brand safety through the lens of associations and engagements, considering the ways that suppliers, partners, vendors, customers, and others cohabitate with different content, organizations, groups, and individuals. We have to ensure that our ecosystem’s beliefs, behaviors, and values are not antithetical to our brand purpose and values. Building And Preserving Trust Brand safety is fundamentally about building and preserving trust. Trust is built through positive experiences that inform audiences of the brand’s values and promise. Research from Forrester’s Business Trust Survey, 2023, shows that trust in one brand can extend to its affiliated brands (a concept Forrester calls “trust transference”). In fact, 74% of global business buyers in our survey say that they are likely to trust a company affiliated with a trusted brand, compared to 42% who would trust a company affiliated with an untrusted brand. Buyers are also more likely to recommend, forgive, and do business with companies affiliated with brands that they trust. The Domino Effect Of Reputational Damage When crisis strikes one brand, the fallout can impact associated brands, as well. Consider how last year’s CrowdStrike outage, which caused widespread disruptions and was crowned the biggest IT outage in history, manifested as the blue screen of death for millions of Microsoft Windows devices. Not only was the Microsoft brand affected, but the ripple effect continued as countless companies including airlines, hospitals, banks, and retailers suffered crippling disruptions, all creating negative brand experiences. Think about the companies with which your brand does business. Do their beliefs and behaviors align with your brand values? What reputational risks might exist in these relationships? As marketing and brand leaders, if you aren’t exploring these questions with the executive team, then your brand is likely at risk. Expanding The Definition Of Brand Safety B2B companies must expand their definition of brand safety to include all aspects of their business relationships and initiatives to effectively protect their brands. The new definition for brand safety is safeguarding a brand’s reputation, ensuring that it minimizes harmful associations while consistently building favorable perceptions. To secure your brand’s reputation under this broader perspective, be sure to: Scrutinize partner, vendor, and customer relationships. The actions and reputations of partners, suppliers, vendors, and customers can directly impact your brand. The goal is to choose wisely. Recognize the level of alignment with your brand values, the amount of control you have in the relationship or initiative, the reward potential, and the risks. Be attentive to the pressures that impact brand safety. Growth and competitive pressures, socioeconomic and political shifts, regulatory environments, and technological advancements all influence brand safety decisions. Be sure to consider diverse cultural sensitivities, varying legal regulations, and shifting political and social values, as well as the layers of complexity these issues have on brand safety. Companies must stay vigilant and adaptable, and marketers must bring these pressures to the attention of executives and advocate for the brand. Build a strong brand. A solid reputation isn’t just good for growing the business; it’s vital for brand resilience. Trusted brands are more likely to be forgiven for product/service mistakes and for behaving out of step with their values. When a crisis occurs, you want your brand to be in the trusted category to ensure that you can regain good standing with greater ease. Prepare a crisis communication plan. Regardless of how carefully a business approaches brand safety, it can’t control everything. There will always be some level of risk. Evaluate the risks and work with legal, executives, and other leaders to build crisis communication plans in case you should ever need to quickly address a crisis to preserve the brand reputation. Brand safety isn’t something to be taken for granted, and preserving it takes continual vigilance. Join me as I dive deeper into this topic at Forrester’s B2B Summit North America, happening March 31–April 3 in Phoenix. My session “Understanding The New Threats To Brand Safety” will explore strategies to help you safeguard your brand and enhance brand reputation despite threats. Hope to see you there! source

Every customer journey can create or destroy value — both for your customers and for your firm. That’s why you need to measure value creation and use these insights to optimize value. At our CX Summit EMEA on June 2–4, 2025, we have two interconnected sessions to help you do that. How To Measure Journeys Effectively will feature insights from Forrester’s journey benchmarking study for three industries: banking, telecommunications, and utilities. How To Optimize Journey Value will teach you how you can optimize value for the customer and the business for each individual journey and in the context of your journey portfolio. This session will also explore how some journeys can kick off a value flywheel by unlocking value, giving you permission and the privilege to play a larger role in a customer’s life. Why Should You Attend? If you want your firm to play a role in customers’ lives and reap the business benefits from that, you need to understand whether journeys create or destroy value for customers currently and how to intervene in journeys. Attend these twin sessions to: See how different brands perform on various customer journeys and which journeys matter most. Learn to use two key lenses to optimize journey value: value proportion and value pattern. Get practical and use Forrester’s checklists to assess journey value for customers and your firm for a journey of your choice. Ready To Unleash A Value Flywheel? Join Us At CX Summit EMEA 2025! My brilliant colleagues, Dr. Maxie Schmidt and Hannah Jachim, and I will be your hosts in those twin sessions on optimizing journey value at CX Summit EMEA from June 2–4, 2025 in London. CX Summit EMEA brings together CX, digital, and marketing leaders to explore the future of customer relationships and learn how to build a total experience — one that aligns brand experience and CX to fuel sustainable growth. Check out the full agenda and register to get the latest on optimizing journey value and take action that truly benefits customers — and your business. source