Software programmers know the pro’s and con’s of forking. It looks as though industry research buyers and publishers need to give forking some serious thought, as well.

Entrepreneurs around the world are using new data harvesting and analysis technologies to combine existing IT industry research findings into new reports and subscription services. These companies publish reports that combine findings from various studies and sources in order to present their own conclusions, summaries or context. That’s why I refer to this process as forking: you end up with new research findings and context. The resulting data is both new and different from the original.

IT World Canada recently highlighted the latest entrant, Infinity Research and its “TechNavio” subscription service. The service blends inhouse data with data aggregated from many sources, including vendor press releases and publicly available summaries of reports from independent IT research firms such as Gartner, Forrester and IDC. Another, more familiar brand name in this space is eMarketer.

Does forked research have a market? Yes, I think so. Many companies buy research with the intent of forking it themselves. Forked research can help companies save time and effort, highlight a specific market condition, or answer a difficult question. After all, the Truth is not always out there.

Just as with forked software, forked research has some downsides. For example, you might pay for research findings that were freely available or you might have no visibility into a survey population.

The annual IT industry research purchasing season is getting underway. I’d suggest taking time now to understand what these value-added aggregators bring to the party. Figure out whether their forked research fits with your existing research sourcing options and spending.

My strategy for sampling the wave of new communications and collaboration tools, thought leaders and brands is to hit the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco next week. I could have kicked myself down Lombard Street for missing last year’s event: the selection of demos, panels and personalities was second to none. This year’s event looks to be even better.

A killer group of analysts, media and other influencers plan to converge on this event. You can get a glimpse of Amy Wohl’s checklist at her SaaS blog, “Bombarded by Innovation”. Jonathan Eunice offers another candid analyst viewpoint at the Illuminata blog, “Out and About: Reinventing Office in September”. You can find the complete list of analysts here.

My mission — aside from filling the gaps in my own toolbox — is to understand how new enterprise office technologies can transform the way we market, deliver and consume industry research. Likewise, I’ll be looking at how these technologies can redefine an analyst relations backoffice. I suspect at least a small subset can have a positive impact on the frontoffice, too.

Wikipedia editors have moved “industry analysts” under the general category “financial analysts”, as part of a move to reduce the number of useful “analyst” categories. This places “industry analyst” in the same bucket with accident analysts, accounting analysts, business analysts, cost analysts, software analysts, sell-side analysts and systems analysts.

The result is an interesting mix of influentials, from Dan Scotto, Barton Biggs and Mary Meeker to Rob Enderle and Gideon Gartner. Most of the articles are about financial analysts. On one level, it’s a taste of the Wikipedia collective psyche. Look at who’s listed, who’s missing, and how people are characterized.

On another level, this collection of biographies is a good reminder of the enormous differences between financial analysts and IT industry analysts.

The Knowledge Capital Group has announced that Gideon Gartner, the founder of Gartner, Soundview, and GIGA Information Group, will be a featured speaker at the KCG Connects event. This event, designed for people who want to learn about analyst relations, coincides with the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando in October.

Personally, I am pleased to see this. I am put off by the way KCG describes the Gartner company founding and early days in their analyst relations handbook. This event presents an opportunity to set the record straight(er) and more importantly, to spark compelling discussions about the industry analyst business.

IMHO, Gideon is well within his rights to say that he brought dramatic innovation to the analyst business in 1979 with the founding of Gartner, and again with the founding of GIGA. His recall is in marked contrast to the current Gartner corporate claim:

This year marks the 26th anniversary of Gartner and the founding of our industry. - Gartner, Inc. Investor Relations website

‘Founding of our industry’? First, you have to ask: Isn’t this the sort of self-serving historical revisionism Gartner is supposed to expose? Then you have to ask: Why does Gartner fail to recognize the importance of its one-time role as a disruptive innovator within this (pre-existing) industry? Gartner making this statement is akin to Google announcing that they founded the search market, or Twitter claiming the invention of IM.

Back on point: Last May, Gideon Gartner enthralled a few hundred analysts, consultants and others for an evening at the Computer History Museum. His business insights were inspirational to all types of high tech entrepreneurs at the event, in addition to those of us clustered in and around the IT industry research and advisory business. So, while you should not book this KCG event to try to get Gideon to invest in your company, you should find him an astute advisor and innovator thinker when it comes to business strategy — and the highlight of a full day of AR 101.

Do not assume that Mr. Gartner’s participation in the KCG event, means similar participation in the Gartner Symposium. Possible, but certainly not inevitable. Despite the example of statesmanship set by Jamie Lewis and Craig Burton at this year’s Catalyst, your best options for buttonholing Mr. Gartner may just be KCG Connects or the next TED.

There’s always another tech provider trying to pull a fast one on you — whether you’re a rich man, poor man, analyst or thief. In these situations, industry analysts can be invaluable. Today’s example: Josh Chalifour, and his post Microsoft Flunked Comparing 101. (This is his personal blog, not a TEC blog.) With an analyst’s eye, he points out some of the logical problems in the latest Microsoft marketing comparison of Windows with Linux. It’s a good read for IT decision makers trying to make sense of these Microsoft assertions.

For the rest of us, there’s more to the story. Adding irony to obfuscation: InformationWeek is reporting that this new comparison effort is a replacement for the old, legally challenged, and internationally maligned Microsoft analyst-reprint program, Get the Facts.

I suspect the Microsoft AR team had little if any control over the new “Comparison” program. Nonetheless, this program continues to top the list of Things Not To Do with Analyst Relations.

If you want a critique of the technology claims, contact Josh directly or post a comment at his blog.

I’m still digesting the blog criteria, descriptive/rating ideas and social debates raised by my volunteer advisory team of analysts and consultants. Sorry it’s taking so long.

Meanwhile, my foraging for social media rating criteria just turned up Ian Delaney’s thought-provoking post at twopointouch, Principles for Online Communities. It’s a short distillation of pre-Web 2.0 essays on designing online communities around the human psyche. He suggests it might be fun to use it to rate the Web 2.0 wunderkinder; I agree. I’m looking at how to apply it to describing/rating analyst blogs.

This sort of list might go a long way to evaluating analyst deployments of [other] social technologies, too. As Mike Gotta noted, more and more analysts are using bookmarking, wikis, twitter, etc. It would be useful to have a system for sorting out which ones have broader value and which are virtual scribbles, link bait, artifacts of a clip junkie, etc.

What would you do, if you were an enterprise IT leader faced with perfectly opposing analyst views on the question of SOA and ROI? As of this morning, this is the dilemma facing IT leaders evaluating SOA, courtesy of Macehiter Ward-Dutton and Nucleus Research.

One the one hand, a Nucleus Research/KnowledgeStorm benchmark survey on SOA deployments and ROI finds low overall adoption of SOA and not much evidence of ROI where it has been deployed.

On the other hand, Macehiter Ward-Dutton takes a dim view of ROI-of-SOA exercises to begin with, in their blog post, The pointless search for SOA ROI.

These analysts are not simply disagreeing on shades of gray. Their arguments nullify each other.

This situation is not all that common. When it does happen, the resulting press coverage tends to focus on point-counterpoint between the analysts. That makes for nice vanity press, perhaps — if you like a good cat fight. However, I’m curious about how this type of situation affects thinking among IT management and IT management consultants.

Maybe enterprise thought leaders like James McGovern and James Taylor (when he is back from holiday) will weigh in on this — not only with their views on the particular question of whether SOA ROI is or is not a meaningful pursuit, but also on the impact of being faced with diametrically opposed analyst opinions on a topic as complex as SOA ROI.

Interested in the upshot of that Forrester Research survey that included readership of analyst relations blogs? Well, don’t hold your breath. Sources inside Forrester today confirmed that the survey, which was scooped by the ARmadgeddon blog, was conducted for internal use only. In other words, the survey wasn’t part of Forrester’s market research for clients. It was part of Forrester’s market research for itself. Currently, there are no plans to publish the results. Therein lies the moral of the story.

It’s about time to stop pretending that the roles-based research services are nothing more than packaging exercises. Gartner and Forrester — two of the most powerful market research companies in the high tech world — have declared formal entry into horizontal market segments. They intend to exert greater influence over ICT decisions and deployments, job by job, or role by role.

It’s time to wake up and smell the councils. Is your company in one of the designated “role-based service” horizontals? If so, you may just find you’ve already been included in market research destined not just for publication — but for internal use by the analyst company. Armed with this information, the analyst company is going to do… what?

This roles-based services model puts a new wrinkle in the AR game. Whatever AR blog you read, it’s worth discussing the implications for research cooperation and (as Noorda would’ve said) co-opetition.

Sam Whitmore’s Media Survey this week shines its Tech Editorial spotlight on the Gartner Magic Quadrant. The live teleconference takes place tomorrow at 4:00 pm EST, 1:00 pm PST. I’m on the show, along with Carter Lusher, director of analyst relations at HP, and a Gartner spokesperson TBA, and of course, the outspoken Sam Whitmore and his SWMS clients. As usual, this group has compiled an interesting list of questions and discussion points, including which parts of the MQ get the most readership, how do I get my client onto one, how do I get my client off of one.

I characterize the Magic Quadrant as the most reviled form of industry analyst research being published anywhere on the planet today. One of the main reasons it is so deeply hated is that it is so deeply loved. Much of the intense loathing that the MQ evokes is a direct response to its popularity with IT vendors. Check it out:

• The term “magic quadrant” was included in more than 400 press releases distributed through Business Wire during the last 12 months
• Google finds about 757,000 web pages including the words Gartner and “magic quadrant”, and that’s limiting results to web pages first seen within the last 12 months and excluding all results from the gartner.com domain

Everyone’s got an opinion on what to do about Magic Quadrants, especially the analyst relations consultants and those who believe they are AR experts whether or not they have ever actually executed on analyst relations themselves. Gartner analysts are a good case in point. Many Gartner analysts make buckets of cash from the Magic Quadrant long after they leave Gartner employment, by providing MQ training, consulting, project management, insider tips, whitepapers, and related expertise ad nauseum.

We’ll see what opinions pop up tomorrow.

New for Cisco-watching analysts, and Cisco-analyst watchers: Skip MacAskill and Blair Christie have launched a blog targeting industry analysts and other opinion leaders. The hello-world post asks for suggestions for the upcoming, invitation-only analyst day, and promises interesting discussions going forward.

The blog is one small part of the legendary online component of Cisco’s AR program.