A Symphony Services press release just gave me a jolt. The head reads, “blah-blah-blah Featuring Leading Independent Analysts John C. McCarthy and Bruce Richardson.” What’s this? John McCarthy quit Forrester, Bruce Richardson quit AMR Research, and they’re independent analysts now? No. I misinterpreted Symphony’s use of “independent.”
“Independent” gets my vote as one of the most over-used, confused, and divisive labels applied to the industry analysts.
Many vendors regularly refer to analyst research studies as “independent”. You’ve seen it in press releases and SEM ads: “An independent study shows…” That always seems a bit odd to me. Think about it. In the first place, why would you bother to promote an analyst study if you felt that right off the bat, you need to convince people that it’s “independent”? In the second place, what’s the benefit of any vendor calling any analyst report “independent”? Either your sales target is already a skeptic and holds a negative opinion about the objectivity of the analyst firm in general (which is now rubbing off on your company by association), or you’ve just raised an objection that your sales target may not have had. You lose either way.
I’m just as guilty as any other culprit in taking liberties with the word. I say “independent analysts” when I mean “SOHO analysts.” It’s a courtesy, from one SOHO (me) to another. Plus, I’ve always disliked “boutique analysts.” What does a boutique analyst do? Sell trendy, overpriced research from Italy? Wouldn’t that mean we should refer to IDC, Gartner and Forrester as “big box analysts”?
We can agree that Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Richardson are well known analysts. We can agree that they’re competing analysts. Chances are we won’t agree on whether they are “leading independent analysts”, until we take some of the “I” out of the meaning of independent.
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January 28th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
At some point, all of us analyst watchers need to come up with common definitions for terms to describe the analyst landscape.
January 29th, 2008 at 8:02 am
Hi Barbara,
well you must have expected a response from me to this! Red Flag to a Bull….
Independent should mean (as it does at CMS Watch) that you don’t work for the vendors you are writing about, period.
If you are consulting to vendors, writing white papers, or accepting flights and hotel accommodation from them, then you are not independent, you are by definition dependent.
There are many great ‘dependent’ analysts and analyst firms - but they are in no way ‘independent’.
The analyst world needs to follow the same ethical norms that govern good journalists and financial analysts.
We do, and we are growing and profitable - and I would encourage others to do the same
All the best!
Alan
January 29th, 2008 at 10:55 am
Good points, both.
Alan, I’ve always believed in the American ideal of a division between “church” (objectivity, freedom of information) and “state” (government, special interests, advertisers) in the media. So, I’m not inclined to agree that vendor revenue sources necessarily result in a “dependence” that taints analyst objectivity.
Key word there is “necessarily”.
January 29th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
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January 29th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
Agreed, and in fact many good analysts produce objective work despite this situation. But there is a disjoint when people claim to be objective about people who are in fact paying their wages.
I don’t suggest our model is for everyone - rather that there should be a clear understanding of an analyst firms ‘interests’ just as if they were financial analysts - people make big financial decisions based on this advice, and its important that they know its basis.
We in the industry know the difference between a vendor funded white paper from a vendor funded analyst firm, and truly objective evaluated analysis - most buyers and users do not.
Best
Alan
February 27th, 2008 at 5:40 am
Alan, as an ex-buyer/user who still spends a lot of time talking to such people, I would not quite agree with your statement “most buyers and users do not.” Most, in my experience, are pretty smart people who know that they’re being fed a line, but in the absence of other, more objective and freely available material, its “best-worst”. As I’ve said elsewhere as well, I don’t think any analyst can call themselves technology-independent, though your own firm is quite laudably able to say it is vendor-independent - which is a thoroughly admirable position particularly given that you do product comparisons.
We all have to be vigilant, as (a comment made by Carter Lusher I think) we are all victims of our own provenance, likes and dislikes, wherever the money comes from. Given that my own firm is essentially evangelising best practice, and not being particularly interested in products per se, we feel pretty comfortable about our objectivity - though of course, we are probably biased towards the approaches that we believe to work - balanced use of policy, awareness and training, understanding of organisational maturity etc. From a research perspective we are in the main funded by vendors, though we do spend a great deal of our time on unfunded research and advisory materials. We’d look pretty silly if we said one thing in one place, and a different thing in another just because we were getting some cash in - and we’d very quickly get found out as well
I thoroughly agree about the expression of interests, which is why (to my knowledge) we have never written anything for money, without making it very clear who is the sponsor. Equally however, we are all partisan - and I have made this point before - when it comes to the technological bandwagons that form, shimmer and mutate in front of our eyes. We saw this with CRM - which was in fact a highly flawed, impractical concept; we are seeing it now with such things as Software as a Service and SOA. Some of the non-vendor-funded work we do constitutes exactly this - determining when a technology category is valid and current, or when its just marchitecture.