Context

This document outlines our upcoming TOP research projects for the next quarter.

If you are interested in contributing to any of these research pieces in development, please reach out to your trusted Info-Tech advisor or our SVP of Research Development, Jack Hakimian (jhakimian@infotech.com).

Quarterly Research Agenda

1. Overview of Our Quarterly Research Agenda
2. Selection of Sample Research Projects
3. Role-Based Research
4. Industry Research
5. About Info-Tech

Better research than anyone

We provide better research than anyone to our members across two major pillars:

Role-based research

Industry-leading, practical research oriented along the key roles in technology departments such as CIO, CISO, or the (S)VP of Infrastructure.

Industry research

Deep, industry-specific methodologies and guidelines to complement our role-based research and provide context for your industry.

Develop a Value-First Business Automation Strategy

Automation projects drive value

This research is intended to:

• Offer guidance in building a value-first automation strategy that can be leveraged to automate at scale.
• Provide a clear Info-Tech position on what automating at scale looks like.
• Provide Info-Tech members with actionable and practical steps all while pointing them to other pieces of our research to help them continue their automation journey.

60% of automation projects fail

• Business automation has been around in different forms for at least a decade. Generative AI and other enhancements in technology are providing new opportunities to take a fresh look at what, how, and why we automate.
• The general perspective is to automate as much as possible as fast as possible. This leads to major challenges:
  • It gives no guidance on priority or importance when it comes to what to automate.
  • In many organizations, it's just not practical to accelerate an automation program.
  • It does not consider a total cost of ownership perspective on automation. Benefits are often overstated while costs and risks are underestimated.

TCO prioritization improves project success rates

• Value is front and center, not your process. While many tools focus on automating processes, the Info-Tech perspective is to make choices based on value delivered and use cases supported.
• Be realistic with your value-first automation strategy. Advisory firms tend to promote aggressive scaling of automation for almost all organizations. While we acknowledge that many organizations are unprepared, unwilling, or unable to accept it, our key argument is that the costs of automating many processes often outweigh the benefits. The reason is that people do not consider the full costs along the entire lifecycle, including ramp-up time to adjust the tools, the need to keep exception routes, changing technology, and integration efforts to other platforms.

Present and Defend Your IT Budget

Get your IT budget approved

• The hardest part of getting an IT strategy approved is often getting approval for the budget. CIOs who are trying to get approval for their IT strategies need a quick and easy way to convince the CEO or Board to spend money on the initiatives contained in the strategy.
• This research will provide a method, a framework, and deliverables to enable CIOs to present their IT budget to their key stakeholders (CEO, CFO, and CXOs/peers in the business) in a way to show the value – to the stakeholder – that IT investment will bring.
• The objective is to gain consensus on the IT budget from the parties that need to approve it. Presenting an IT budget to the different stakeholders will address the following:
  • Showing alignment between IT budget and strategic business initiatives
  • Showing that IT is realizing economies of scale
  • Proposing sources of funding for IT investments
• Info-Tech recognizes that different executives require a different perspective on IT budgets. The project will provide a method and templated exemplars for IT budget presentations tailored to a CEO, CFO, and CXOs.

Stop being viewed as a cost center

• Our IT strategy methodology advocates categorizing IT initiatives along:
  • IT Excellence: Improving IT maturity and the effectiveness of IT services (KTLO)
  • Business Support: Improving business productivity (Grow)
  • Business Innovation: Enabling the digital transformation of the organization's business model (Innovate)
• Finance generally leads the budgeting cycle. Finance requires department budgets to align to their asset-based categorization of projected spending.
• IT budgets – particularly budget growth – struggle to gain approval as the CEO/CFO often views IT as a cost center whose efficiency needs to be optimized over time and does not understand or believe the associated budgets are necessary to execute the strategy. This is due to:
  • Poor linkage and clarity between IT strategy and the associated IT budget (both CapEx and OpEx)
  • Inability to gain approval on IT strategy due to poorly communicated value to the overall business strategy
  • Economic pressures that drive IT budget focus from a strategic to a tactical level

Present the correct perspective

• Showing alignment between the IT budget and the different categories of IT initiatives will improve the linkage between the required funding and the business strategy and objectives.
• Presenting the IT budget from the perspective of the stakeholder will show them the value that they expect. For example, a CFO needs to see that IT is realizing economies of scale on their core services while understanding how the request for additional budget is essential to enable new business initiatives.
• Different IT budget presentations are therefore needed for each stakeholder.

Establish High-Value IT Performance Metrics

Communicate business value via IT metrics

• Act good and make it known. Communicating the value and performance of IT is as essential for CIOs as running their domain effectively. Yet, most IT leaders continue to struggle with metrics.
• Additionally, 70-80% of CXOs believe that IT needs to improve its metrics across all metric types, including technology performance, cost and salary, stakeholder satisfaction, executive feedback, and risk. The greatest area for improvement reported by CXOs is related to business value, with 83% of CXOs identifying that these need to be improved (Source: Info-Tech CXO Alignment Diagnostic).
• This research will look to significantly simplify the process and provide our members with easy-to-customize reports based on various personas and scenarios, taking the hard work of figuring out what to measure off their plate. We believe there is an answer to what you should be reporting to your key audiences. Start with Info-Tech's audience-targeted established reports, and customize and test your metrics to focus on the ones most important for your audience and strategy.

Avoid incorrect metrics that provide inaccurate storylines

• Wrong Metrics: Most organizations pick the wrong metrics. Starting with what they can measure, not what their stakeholders care about.
• Too Many Metrics: Organizations are tracking too many activity-level metrics, resulting in meaningless data and wasted time tracking.
• Metrics Without Action: Not learning and changing based on the data is close proxy for insanity.
• Metrics Not Tailored to the Audience: Using internal metrics as external metrics, or not responding to audience needs.
• Bad Data and Bad Storylines: Many executives simply don't trust the data or see the connection to business outcomes.

Make sure your metrics tell the right story

• Instead of other offerings in the market and how we have done it ourselves in previous "metrics research pieces," we will not provide a detailed methodology on developing a dashboard. Instead, we are leading with ready-to-go, best-in-class CIO dashboards and then guide members on how to tailor it. We would like to minimize the effort for our members to implement it and drive adoption, given that we are leading with the answer. Take reporting from a required to a value-generating activity by focusing on business-aligned metrics, simplifying the collection, and acting when metrics hit vital thresholds.
• Focus on fewer, high-impact, "tension" metrics and stop overcomplicating your reporting with single-focused metrics on how IT runs its business.
• The way performance is measured indicates what activities your employees should prioritize; make sure your metrics tell the right story.

Annual Data-Driven IT Workforce Planning: A Critical CIO Exercise

Invest smartly in the current market

• With three years of record low unemployment rates, recruitment in IT has been a consistent issue. With Big Tech layoffs and emerging economic pressures, the IT market is beginning to open. However, organizations going into a cost-containment mode need to ensure they make the right hiring investments.
• We consistently hear that security, data, and architecture are the hardest roles to fill and you need to pay for top talent, but does catching a "big fish" in these areas drive significant business value that outweighs the costs of hiring these talents?
• IT leaders need a plan for when, where, and how they invest their human capital dollars and mobilize IT talent.
• This project will leverage your diagnostic data and strategy to provide recommendations on the right staffing level, where and when to invest, initiate recruitment, train, and outsource.

Focus on solving the right problem

• Securing Headcount: I need to determine and build the business case to secure funding for the needed IT staff based on the growth and strategy of my organization.
• Financial Pressure: I need to determine where to best invest my human capital dollars, where to spend for top talent, and where I should train high-performing staff.
• Opportunities Sourcing: I need to establish a flexible sourcing plan that takes advantage of cost-cutting opportunities without compromising quality.
• Time to Hire: I need to fix my talent pipeline so I don't have long vacancies impacting my ability to deliver.
• Shiny Object Searching: Looking for the unicorn IT employee and overbuilding job descriptions for roles that could be better served by focusing on the critical skills needed.

Make strategic investments to drive business value

• Talent is often one of the first places organizations look to cut costs in times of economic uncertainty. Your workforce plan needs to clearly demonstrate how the staff are needed to deliver on corporate goals.
• Take advantage of Big Tech layoffs to fill critical roles in your organization but strategically select where to invest. Leverage Info-Tech's Big Tech Layoff Report for how (set for publication this quarter).
• "Hiring the best" is not an affordable workforce strategy for any organization. Not every role needs to be filled by "A" players – know where to invest to drive organizational impact.
• Availability is not a skillset. Ensure that your workforce plan considers the skills needed to execute on strategic goals and systematically staff your IT organization to drive business satisfaction.

Effectively Manage Your CXO Relations

Leverage stakeholders to improve your impact

Info-Tech's Business Satisfaction Diagnostic can help identify who the supporters and detractors of the CIO are in the organization. Our data shows that high business satisfaction scores lead to more productive, higher impact IT departments.

But knowing your scores is not enough: you must actively manage all your key stakeholders,and that means taking the time to analyze your key relationships and build an approach for each.

This research blueprint will build an approach to determine IT's standing within the key business units, map out the existing relationship with each CXO, and suggest how a CIO can best manage their relationship with them.

Stakeholder management is not a one-size-fits-all scenario

Most stakeholder management programs are based on loosely defined goals and lack structure.

Furthermore, most technology leaders live in a silo, causing a lack of insights on how to significantly improve stakeholder relationships.

CIOs often do not take the time to understand the key expectations of each (or at least the most relevant) CXO and end up using a cookie-cutter stakeholder management approach that does not take the specificities of each relationship into consideration.

Understand stakeholder expectations to define your approach

Continuous monitoring of your stakeholders' key processes, metrics, issues, and IT usage will lead to higher business satisfaction scores and improve your IT department's effectiveness.

Baselining each stakeholder's expectations is essential in defining your stakeholder management approach. So is determining the unique working styles of each stakeholder.

Prepare to Adopt Digital Identity Solutions in the Enterprise

Build your digital identity

As many governments are researching, prototyping, or deploying the concept of a digital identity, the rapidly growing ecosystem will enable public sector institutions and private enterprises to transact with customers and partners in more consistent, reliable, and secure ways. This project will enable technology leaders to identify critical use cases for digital ID within the enterprise and build an opportunity description for each use case.

• Once the elements of the national and global ecosystems are known or in place, we will be expanding the development of this project to enable the CIO to build a digital ID adoption roadmap to mitigate business risks for the organization. The digital identity certificate, as advocated by the World Economic Forum, blends the credential information of an individual and attributes generated by transactional information into a single framework.

Digital identifiers would be used for use cases requiring trust, authentication, and authorization. We will help CIOs, by using our reference business capability architectures, to prioritize use cases to explore the adoption of digital IDs and pilot their use.

Overcome the associated challenges

With the massive shift of services online, driven more so during the pandemic, organizations lack trusted forms of securing digital Interactions. The current shortcomings are:

• Consistency
• Lack of standardization in tools
• Disjointed and mismanaged frameworks
• Security risk related to hacks and breaches

While there is a lot of hype around digital identity, as well as definite investment from governments and vendors into a digital identity ecosystem, the rest of the public and private sector is not yet sure how to use digital IDs for authentication in other cases like B2B and B2C transactions.

Understand your digital identity needs

Explore the benefits and risks for your organization's use of digital IDs, but don't invest yet in consultants. Standardization in the digital ID ecosystem(s) has not yet been formed, and the parameters of the solutions that will be offered are, in many areas, to be determined.

Digital ID use cases will either be used to secure transactions between the organization and third parties or to synergize with the organization's own products (and offer opportunity to augment products).

Build Your Generative AI Roadmap

Leverage generative AI to deliver value to the business

ChatGPT has created a simplified, human relatability to the power of AI, which in turn has created significantly increased executive leader interest in how their business can exploit the opportunities of generative AI tools. For our many digital and technology leader members, this creates a golden opportunity to showcase thought leadership in digital transformation and digital enablement and deliver new additive value to their business partners.

This research is aimed at providing technology and digital leaders with the tools that will help them take advantage of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools to rapidly identify and deliver high-value cases that will harness executive interest and support them in learning how to how to expand and scale these solutions to sustain this momentum.

While there may be numerous applications, we expect initially that seed value is likely to be returned in one or more of the following capability groups: client or customer experience and support and enterprise support and optimization.

Overcome barriers to embrace early adoption

Info-Tech aims to help its members to fast-track (in their industry) the use of generative AI and help them to lead the market or to remain fiercely competitive. The key challenges and barriers we want to help our members to address are:

• How to start fast with ChatGPT and other generative AI tools.
• How to identify the business opportunity and value to target and how to address the feasibility challenges that need to be addressed to get results quickly and sustain momentum.
• How to move from initial projects to scaled use of generative AI.
• There are not many commercial use cases of ChatGPT and generative AI yet clearly defined (besides a lot of opinions expressed over the last two months).
• Those that do exist are not well established.
• Existing use cases typically apply to online content creators; we need to understand how to move beyond this.

Explore the value to come from accelerating the overall creative process

Those companies that can leverage generative AI technology early are likely to create competitive advantage and value. We initially expect most of this value will come from accelerating the overall creative process within our members' businesses. While this may at first seem a narrow focus, the potential advantages are significant:

• Helping members to become innovators in their industry.
• Creating financial savings for members through operating efficiencies.
• Increasing members' speed to market for products and services.
• Improving customer satisfaction and loyalty for our members.
• Helping our members to build generative AI capabilities to further expand the use of it as the market will continue to evolve and more offerings will become available.

Exploit Your ITSM Ticket Data

Drive business improvement with ITSM data

Enterprises are looking to build insightful, robust internal data sets to drive insights for business improvements everywhere. The truth is that almost all organizations already have one of the most powerful sets available: their ITSM ticket data. Info-Tech's Concierge Service offers a fully customized analysis for our member organizations to drive substantial impact for their IT departments and the business.

This research output has three phases that guide the member on how to design a repetitive process to collect, analyze, and act on the results of their tickets over time. This Concierge Service is focused on Phase 2 (analyze).

Rather than guiding the member through doing their own data analysis, we will analyze the data for them.

Avoid losing value by not leveraging dataITSM

Most organizations treat their ITSM as a pure internal customer service tool and isolated service desk department. This does not only miss the mark from a customer satisfaction perspective, as we know that the Service Desk is the "storefront" of every IT department. It also neglects the opportunity to exploit the ITSM ticket data for IT satisfaction root-cause analysis, service desk optimization, and most importantly, business intelligence.

There are two major problems:

• Unawareness: Most organizations are unaware of the explanatory power of their ITSM ticket data and the level of insights it allows for.
• Capacity and capabilities: Almost all organizations lack either the capacity or the capabilities to execute the analysis of the data. The amount of data to analyze is overwhelming without the necessary skill sets, leading to uncertainty about where to start.

Improve stakeholder management with ITSM data management

There are several situations for when this Concierge Service is applicable:

• An organization is identifying opportunities for improvement, be it cost reduction or customer satisfaction increases. Related efforts are often sponsored by the COO or CRO.
• A CIO and their direct reports are trying to identify improvement opportunities for the IT department.
• An IT department is rolling out a new software or service. Our service could support both the initial requirement gathering and ongoing project monitoring and IV&V.
• An Infrastructure leader is revamping or enhancing their service desk. By providing this service at the beginning of a member's ITSM standardization journey, it would give valuable insight on the current state, set a baseline, and inform the next step on their journey.

Critical Project Oversight and Assistance

Effective PMO oversight to improve the probability of success

This advisory service is designed to help members through regular and ad hoc reviews of the major milestones of their critical projects.

This service will use best practices for supervising major projects. Info-Tech analysts will help ensure project success by being involved in a preset number of reviews (e.g. monthly) to help provide assurance, guidance, and course correction efforts.

At each major milestone or stage gate, a project document would be provided by the client (produced by the client or a third-party consulting firm or contractor) to the Info-Tech analyst prior to a meeting with the project manager or another relevant stakeholder. Our analyst team would review the document appropriate to the stage, provide our top three recommendations, and provide coaching and advisory assistance on those recommendations to help assure project success.

This service will be useful whether the member organization has a third-party vendor or consultant involved or whether it is a major internal project that is of top strategic importance to the organization's success. In each case, Info-Tech would act as an advisor, providing feedback to the member on project documents and recommending adjustments to improve the probability of project success. Info-Tech would also provide the structure and rigor of effective PMO oversight.

Unforeseen risks that jeopardize project success

CIO members will have one or more critically important projects to deliver during the tenure of their membership.

Often, our clients engage consultants or vendors to help oversee some of these major projects to ensure that they are delivered successfully. However, third-party project oversight is not engaged, exposing the organization to numerous risks during implementation that could have been identified and rectified if project oversight was invoked.

Transparent project oversight

• Choose an advisor, not an auditor, for project oversight. This will encourage the project management team to be transparent and to learn from the experience.
• Project recommendations made after each review need to be actionable in the short term.
• Know when to make difficult recommendations: freezing the project or pulling the plug if the risk is too high.

Stop Wasting Time Evaluating Commoditized Products

Decreased timeframe to commoditization

There's a new word in the IT dictionary: hyper-change. It's not a new concept though. Moore's Law led to the law of accelerating returns, which very naturally led to what is being called hyper-change. It means that the lifecycle time from innovation to commodity in most mainstream technology markets is rapidly shrinking. There are examples abound over the past 20 years including cloud computing, smartphones, and countless applications. Innovations are even being commoditized from the outset (e.g. ChatGPT).

• What does it mean to IT leaders?
• What does it mean to vendors?

It means that innovative products in markets that not long ago took years to reach commodity are now being commoditized in months.

Value eroded in understanding technology fit

IT leaders spend an inordinate amount of time and resources evaluating and procuring technology solutions that have become, or are rapidly becoming, commodities. The time wasted comparing features and functionality in commoditized markets can be measured in person-years in many organizations. It is wasted time and resources that can never be recovered.

• How do you identify commodity markets quickly?
• What really matters when evaluating products in commoditized markets?

IT leaders haven't yet adapted to hyper-change (the law of accelerating returns) and rapid commoditization when evaluating technology markets.

Redefine evaluation criteria

IT leaders can save time and resources by changing the way they evaluate products in markets that are rapidly becoming commoditized. Evaluate broader markets and technology landscapes, as opposed to viewing every product in every market as differentiated.

• Quickly identify where a technology market is in the race to commoditization.
• Leverage proven methodologies to reduce the selection and purchasing lifecycle from months or years to days or weeks.
• Change your procurement process, from product identification to evaluation to selection to purchasing.
• Rethink the way you make purchasing decisions and evaluate solutions in markets moving to commodity.

Design and Implement a Business-Centric Security Program

Make your security program a reality

A typical approach for building a new security program or transforming an existing but underperforming program is to start with building a security strategy. A good strategy is a great first step. However, security strategies are control-centric. To take the next leap to business-centric security, organizations need to carefully design their security program around the security services that implement their controls in the larger business context.

The purpose of this project is to help IT leaders design and implement a security program. An existing security strategy is an important input, one that provides business requirements, risk analyses, and a prioritized roadmap of security initiatives. This project can help leaders take their security roadmap, and implement the governance structures, accountabilities, and security services they need to make it a reality.

This project will provide a methodology and tools to enable security leaders to design and implement a business-centric security program.

Lack of guidance leads to a reduction in business satisfaction

Security leaders need to improve their security posture and reduce risk while meeting stakeholder expectations for security. Unfortunately, common security frameworks provide little assistance on how to implement a security program.

The lack of guidance leads to a lack of structure in the way security services are designed and managed, which reduces service quality, increases security friction, and reduces business satisfaction.

*Importantly, this research will not require the member to have an existing strategy. Some members need assistance shaping their security program before investing in a strategy, which can be a time-consuming exercise. Members can design and implement their security program, build governance structures, assign accountabilities, and identify relevant security services based on business requirements now and develop their strategy later.

Make business value the center of your security program

Security frameworks are static and focused on operational controls and standards. They belong in your program's solar system but not at its center.

Focus your program on business value and the security services that enable it, not security controls.

Review Your IT Documents Service

Improve your understanding of your documentation

Organizations are looking for a second set of eyes on major documents used by their departments.

The Document Review Concierge Service will aim to provide immense value to clients with an official mechanism to have an analyst review a document from any topic area.

Documentation value eroded due to lack of prioritization

IT organizations face two major challenges related to our proposed Document Review Concierge Service:

1. External-facing documents: In today's environment, there are numerous types of documents IT organizations need to create, negotiate, maintain, store, and manage in general. Simultaneously, the requirements are constantly becoming more complex. As a single IT organization in isolation, it is almost impossible to keep up to date on all fronts. While other functions such as Legal and Procurement commonly provide support, this only tackles a small portion of the problem such as standard contract terms or usually limited price comparisons. What it does not tackle are the IT-specific insights.
2. Internal documents: Creating and maintaining documentation is not easy and not always a straightforward process for technology leaders or their employees. Documentation is often viewed as low value and involves too much time away from the team's high-priority work. This leads to rushed and low-quality documentation that is critical to other stakeholders involved.

Experience is required to improve quality

Do not start from scratch: Leverage Info-Tech SMEs to review existing documentation to improve the quality of your most critical IT documents. Know when to make difficult recommendations: freezing the project, or pulling the plug if the risk is too high.

The Future of Mainframes in Banking

Unique needs require unique solutions

• The Retail Banking market has been ever evolving. New entrants are competing with traditional banks and these nimble newcomers are quickly developing innovative products and services. As a result, they are stealing market share.
• New entrants can select which of the traditional bank's products and services to attack. They don't need to invest in the physical locations or less profitable products expected from a full-service bank. To survive, traditional banks continue to provide full-service banking to their clients in the hope to maintain and further monetize relationships.
• Too often, banks are looking to alternative platforms as their future. There is a common belief that traditional banks must compete on the same platforms as the new entrants to be competitive. This is not necessarily true.

Legacy mainframes are ineffective in our modern world

• Banks require unique performance from their platforms. No other industry requires the same speed, volume, security, and reliance on real-time processing.
• Traditional banks need to choose where they are going to invest. Banks can no longer afford to invest in all new competitive products and services appearing in the market due to higher equity requirements and tighter margins.
• Banks must protect their core processing capabilities while enhancing their products and services to meet evolving client expectations.
• Legacy mainframes are expensive and cumbersome to develop new products and services. The traditional model for mainframes is no longer effective in our modern world.

Remain competitive by leveraging microservices and APIs

• Info-Tech Research Group will show you how to compete more effectively by demonstrating opportunities to upgrade your existing mainframe technology and leverage microservices and APIs.
• Info-Tech's approach maintains all the effective advantages of mainframes in Banking while building the ability to improve agility and performance and having the capital to invest more in new, innovative products and services.
• With a modernized mainframe and framework for microservice and API development, traditional banks can compete with new entrants. Traditional banks that modernize their legacy platforms are positioned to deepen client relationships and profitably grow.

Understand the Implications of Generative AI in Education

Prepare for the impact of generative AI

Generative AI has roared onto the scene like a lion. In the first two months post-launch Open AI's ChatGPT reached 100 million users. It took TikTok nine months to reach this same milestone.

The advanced functionality to search and create content has many industries wondering what the future holds, none more concerned than Education.

Info-Tech Research Group examines the implications of generative AI on Education and predicts and prepares members for what the future holds for educators, students, and IT professionals.

Tackle the risks and opportunities posed by gen AI

Concerns abound regarding the impact Chat GPT will have on the independent education of students and their ability to learn. Cheating is at the top of the list.

Is this a fad or is generative AI going to transform the classroom in the same way calculators, the internet, and digital assets have transformed the way we teach and learn?

How do educators embrace generative AI and leverage its strengths to enhance learning and development?

Embrace gen AI to enhance your services

Generative AI is here to stay. Those educators who adopt beneficial aspects of these platforms will enhance the education their students receive.

Info-Tech has a three-phase approach to implementing generative AI:

1. Immediate Response: Address cheating through technology.
2. Short to Medium Term: Identify benefits to Education.
3. Longer Term: Implement policy changes and governance.

Role-Based Topics

1. Applications
2. CIO IT Finance
3. CIO Org Transformation
4. CIO People & Leadership
5. CIO Strategy
6. Data & Analytics
7. Infrastructure & Ops
8. Project & Portfolio Management
9. Research Fellowship
10. Security
11. Cross-Cutting Projects

Selected research projects in the quarter ahead

Research and Advisory investments since 2020

Info-Tech is committed to continually investing in our Research and Advisory practices to drive greater member impact and value at every interaction.

Here are some highlights of the investments we've made in the last two years:

New Products to Drive Your Success

20+ new products and services

• Rapid Application Selection Framework
• Industry Research & Advisory Services
• Concierge Services
• Vendor Negotiation & Price Benchmarking
• IT Spend & Staffing Benchmarking
• IT Cost Optimization Research Center
• Digital Transformation Programs
• Cybersecurity Workforce Development Program
• Data Culture and Service Desk Satisfaction Diagnostics
• Technical Counselor Program

Core Research and Advisory

• 2x analyst talent pool
• 2x call capacity to >40,000 analyst calls per year
• 3x counselors
• 500 new pieces of research
• 1,500+ new SoftwareReviews reports
• 200+ new SoftwareReviews categories
• 1,000+ attendees at Info-Tech LIVE!

Measured Value Average Increase*

* N=14,517 Measured Value Surveys

On average, Info-Tech members who have been working with us since before the pandemic report a nearly 10% higher business satisfaction than their peers as reported by our CIO Business Vision diagnostic.

Info-Tech Research Leadership Team

“We have a world-class team of experts focused on providing practical, cutting-edge IT research and advice.”

Gord Harrison

Head of Research & Advisory
Info-Tech Research Group

Aaron Shum

Vice President
Security & Privacy Research

Larry Fretz

Vice President
Industry Research

Mark Tauschek

Vice President
Research Fellowships

Tom Zehren

Chief Product Officer

Rick Pittman

Vice President
Advisory Quality & Delivery

Jack Hakimian

Senior Vice President
Research & Development

Nora Fisher

Vice President
Shared Services

Becca Mackey

Vice President
Workshops

Geoff Nielson

Senior Vice President
Global Services & Delivery

Brett Rugroden

Senior Vice President
Global Services & Delivery

Hannes Scheidegger

Senior Vice President
Global Public Sector