It’s that time of year again. Time to decide which industry analysts called the shots, gave the answers, and made the time often enough to earn an IT research and advisory contract for 2007. My advice to analysts this year: publish proof points showing your accuracy, timeliness, objectivity, engagement. Put forward some well researched — not just well rehearsed — reasons for us to believe.
Analyst bashups, in general, are nothing new. Historically, the most damage was done by competitive sales teams and word of mouth — the kind of thing you find in any industry. A few journalists would take the time to sleuth planned budgets or controversial practices, and that was pretty much the extent of it.
Blogs have changed the old analyst bashups. More people than ever are publishing anecdotes about smart and not-so-smart analyst opinions, research, forecasts.
Some examples of what’s out there, how easy it is to find:
- Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff apparently told the London City Show audience that he listens to Ovum’s Bradshaw, because Bradshaw knows his stuff and called it right more consistently than Gartner or Forrester. His endorsement went far beyond the back of the room. It was reported by Salesforce.com ISV Gareth Davies in his blog, Where’s the Upside?, and relayed in James Governor’s blog, MonkChips. I found it there via my FeedDemon RSS channel of favorite analyst blogs.
- Todd Defren, a principal at PR agency SHIFT Communications, spins a typical sour-grapes anecdote about Gartner Magic Quadrants into an open call for bashups about Gartner and any/all analysts at his pr-squared blog. I found it via a simple Technorati search for blog posts on Gartner and Magic Quadrants.
- Telephia suffered collateral damage in the Cingular/Sprint Nextel/Verizon cell phone network war. Blog spin of a NY Times article describing Telephia’s involvement in Cingular advertising claims (”fewest dropped calls”) included mopocket.com, and engadget mobile. As with most posts at engadget, this one was picked up by a half dozen other blogs in addition to the numerous RSS feed aggregators. Boston Globe’s story resulted in its own cascade of blog coverage, such as Joho the Blog and WebProNews.com. I found these using a Google blog search for background on the Telephia lawsuit against M:Metrics.
These are just a few examples of the reverb going on out here. This doesn’t even take into account dedicated analyst-watching bloggers, such as GartnerWatch and ARmadgeddon, or enterprise IT bloggers such as James McGovern blogging at Enterprise Architecture: Thought Leadership.
Plus, you’ve got all the blogs relaying that usual sprinkling of investigative reporting I mentioned earlier. A recent example: Computerworld New Zealand’s forum piece questioning research transparency and objectivity. This came to my attention via a reader who chose to remain anonymous. Talk about irony. Still, I followed the link and bookmarked it.
My point is that the critics are not just a few Fortune 100 directors on the back nine, or a band of trolls piping through anonymous proxy servers. Whether you need to see this as a tipping point or an inflection point, just get the point:
Analyst, research thyself and share thy findings.
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September 15th, 2006 at 1:49 pm
Barbara … for the record, my point was that sour-gripers COULD band together/blog about their experiences with Gartner, not that they SHOULD.
September 15th, 2006 at 2:32 pm
Todd, My read was that your post is advocating public, online push back. I appreciate your clarification here — big difference.
September 15th, 2006 at 4:30 pm
Marc’s introduction of David Bradshaw was spontaneous having just spotted him in the audience and he commented that David was who he went to for information when he needed to know what was happening in the industry - he did not state that the audience should do likewise. His comments on his perceptions of relative accuracy vs. Gartner & Forrester were as reported, perhaps he would not have been so bullish had the others been in the room, or if he thought I’d blog the comments?
September 15th, 2006 at 7:08 pm
Gareth, Example corrected, thank you.
I can’t imagine Benioff censoring his comments based on whether Gartner, Forrester or bloggers were in the room. He has never been shy about contradicting — or bandying — analyst opinions. His implied candor - spontaneity - is what makes this instance so compelling.
September 16th, 2006 at 1:40 pm
Barbara: the influence landscape is changing rapidly as I wrote below in the link last yeat
“When the Soviet Union broke up, it is said many diplomats did not know what to do with all the new countries that emerged. They wanted to keep dealing with Russia and saw the changed world from the old lens. The influence game is similarly changing.”(but AR keeps wanting to see it in Big analyst terms…
read post at dealarchitect blog
September 17th, 2006 at 4:53 am
Enterprises are starting to pay attention to the value proposition of industry analysts and their integrity. Many are aware that they haven’t been receiving complete coverage of a domain as many firms are not covering major movements such as open source…