Ted Schadler and John McCarthy of Forrester just completed a report titled “Mobile Is the New Face of Engagement”. I had the pleasure of moderating a panel discussion at a TCS Innovation Forum last week, where Ted served as part of the panel. Prior to the panel discussion, Ted used a 45 minute presentation to effectively summarize the content of the new report. He provided a written summary via his Blog yesterday.

I love the phrase “Systems of Engagement”. I’ve struggled with the notion of customer experience, as I believe it ignores the partner and employee engagement enabled by Digital. The report does a great job of articulating what needs to happen in the next several years as mobile truly becomes the face of engagement. The method of governance proposed in the report – a Chief Mobility Officer – is a start, but I feel it may still pose a governance issue as social COE’s and Analytics COE’s and Cloud COE’s spring up. I posed this question to Ted last week, and he mentioned the notion of a Chief Engagement Officer, which I think gets us closer. I believe the report accurately describes a pending shift from systems of record to systems of engagement – a shift that is likely to dwarf the reengineering efforts of the late 90’s.

The report presents a very strong case for the changes required by the emerging digital enterprise. There are some mind blowing statistics that describe how companies have underestimated the activity levels associated with new mobile applications – and the impact it has on underlying infrastructure. I also love the emergence of smart products that leverage WiFi and embedded apps – think of the data that companies can capture from these new products.

Executives are managing their businesses in unprecedented times – reports like this one help us all as we move to develop our future digital strategies.