Analyst's Photo Name and Title Contact information
Phil Murphy

Phil Murphy
Principal Analyst

Research Coverage

Application Development, Application Modernization, Application Portfolio Management, Application Rationalization, Architecture & Technology Strategy, Competency & Skills Management, Financial Services, Government, Human Capital Management, IT Management, Portfolio Management & PMOs, Retiring Workforce, Strategic Application Planning

Research Focus

Phil serves Application Development & Delivery professionals seeking strategies that will help them streamline and manage their application portfolios. Phil’s coverage includes application:

  • Modernization: Monitor, renew, replace, or retire existing applications/platforms.
  • Portfolio management (APM): Drive business-aligned modernization via metrics/assessments.
  • Rationalization: Streamline the portfolio to reduce lights-on IT costs and increase agility.
  • Strategic planning: Align business and IT vision and align the application/infrastructure to fulfill the joint business/IT vision.

Phil focuses his research to the ear of application professionals, but the research also draws the interest of enterprise architects, CIOs, and other IT professionals.

Previous Work Experience

Phil's IT experience dates back to 1982, when he held positions with: the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (consultant); Boston University (application developer); and Cullinet Software, where Phil held positions as a software developer and consultant before he was promoted to IT director. When CA bought Cullinet in 1989, Phil joined insurance-company-startup Arbella Mutual Insurance as director of applications where he worked with a management team to literally create an IT department and implement its initial applications / operating environment. In 1992, Phil accepted a director-level position with the National Council on (workers) Compensation Insurance (NCCI), where he directed a team that developed and distributed a commercial software package, implemented a financial applications package, and rolled out the nation’s first Internet-based information service to the worker's compensation industry. Phil held the top management position in NCCI's $26 million Y2K program office — leveraging offshore programming resources to remediate its applications and onsite staff to execute Y2K testing, effectively creating a round-the-clock remediation process.

Phil joined Giga Information Group in 1997 as an industry analyst, covering the Y2K phenomenon, and was promoted to the position of managing director of research for its e-practices group. Since Forrester Giga in 2003, Phil has been bringing his broad technical and managerial experience to bear on application and IT management topics that concern Forrester's diverse client base.

Latest Research


Phil Murphy serves Application Development & Delivery professionals.

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Recent Media Citations
Computerwoche (GER), "CIOs need to clean up IT," January 12, 2012
Computerworld, "New Job for Mainframes: Hosting private clouds," July 18, 2011
SearchSOA, "Modernize? Consider the MIPS," May 15, 2011
Computerworld, "New job for mainframes: Cloud platform," March 30, 2011
SearchSOA, "On The 'Organizational Mainframe' And SOA Integration," December 8, 2010