Charlene Li today announced in the Groundswell blog that she will be departing Forrester Research. Charlene is a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, and co-author of the Groundswell book and blog. Her last day will be Friday, July 18th.

Hundreds of analysts depart from the research business — or change companies — each year. Each leaves behind a personal legacy. After all, the analyst business is a people business. Ask someone for their favorite story about the analyst firms and chances are they’ll tell you a story about a person, not a research report. I would argue that it’s the people aspect of the analyst business that truly separates it from its sister industries, publishing and market research.

Of the many departures from the profession each year, a few stand out. These departures seem to cause a ripple across the analyst, analyst-watcher, and technology adopter communities. I suspect that when we look back on 2008, Charlene Li’s decision to leave Forrester will be one that stands out. In a relatively short time, she made a sizable impact. Credit George Colony and Charles Rutstein and the rest of the management team for giving her freedom to take risks.

Best wishes to Charlene for whatever comes next!

Only one IT industry analyst company could usurp rumors of a 3G iPhone with the hottest Apple story-of-the-hour among business, tech and consumer press and bloggers worldwide. That would be Forrester Research. They have proven once again that issuing a well-timed (and well promoted) vision will score more market attention than a rigorous reckoning of the here-and-now.

The viral news coverage centers on the report, “The Future Of Apple Inc. - By 2013, Apple’s Product Mix Will Make It A Credible Hub Of The Digital Home”, by J.P. Gownder and James McQuivey.

The swarm of press and blog coverage in the last 48 hours ranges from /. and CrunchGear, to the Wall Street Journal and the BBC. A few of my favorites:

Wall Street Journal: Apple Daydreaming: Report Predicts Move Toward Home Devices (tch, Mossberg was out of the office)

Computerworld: “Apple will rule the living room by 2013, Forrester says”

IT News: “Apple to ‘rule the home’ by 2013″ (hat tip to Slashdot)

Some reporters — such as iTWire’s Alex Zaharov-Reutt — have concluded that no one will buy the report. After all, the contents have been dissected thoroughly in the freely available press.

My take is that Forrester was much more interested in leveraging this analysis for publicity and branding, than for sales of a $249 report. The combination of topic, timing, and media relations is flawless. All in all, another impressive bit of marketing savvy from Forrester.

Tony Law (ITasITis blog) was in touch today, following up on his very first contribution here (that head-to-head competitors to Gartner’s Hype Cycle report include Forrester Research, with their TechRadar reports). He’s just posted a comparative assessment of TechRadar and Hype Cycle. Start-ups, VCs and enterprise early adopters will appreciate the comparison. Check it out. Well done.

The only point I would add to Tony’s analysis, is take care if you decide to track TechRadar reports via Google/RSS/Technorati alerts. Despite the Forrester mark tacked onto “TechRadar,” you’ll need to filter out monster results pointing to Future media’s consumer tech news and review site, TechRadar.com.

The report he evaluates, “Forrester TechRadar(TM): The Extended Supply Chain Application Ecosystem, Q2 2008,” lists at $279. I would compare to current Gartner Hype Cycle pricing, but their public site is down until tomorrow.

BTW, Tony is a scholar and a gentleman in my eyes. He made Tekrati history last month, by becoming the first person to send me a detailed assessment of the free Tekrati firms directory — including some outdated links, links/nomenclature we disagree on, and links/companies I hadn’t heard of.

This week, Gartner and Forrester are announcing financial results. The announcements should shed more light on their transition to peer-council and roles-based packaging, pricing, and structural alignments.

Each company is executing the transition differently. Forrester is moving faster and making sweeping, comprehensive changes. Gartner is transitioning more slowly, rolling out changes in more gradual steps, and creating an “evolutionary” experience for customers. They seem to be in a dead heat in transferring the concepts to their events businesses.

Against this backdrop, the mothership of peer-driven roles-based research and consulting — the Corporate Executive Board — today announced mixed results. CEB fell short of expectations for 4Q 2007 growth in contract value. The growth was just above 10%. However, other CEB news speaks to why its model is so attractive to Wall Street: more than 90% customer retention for the year, impressive expansion into new international and mid-sized enterprise markets, service introductions tracking rapidly emerging opportunities.

Some say Wall Street prodded Gartner and Forrester into embracing CEB’s peer councils and role-based research. That sounds reasonable, but that’s the past.

Today, the change is well underway. It’s high time we see if the CEB model can teach the old dogs some new tricks.

During November, 19 blogs written by analysts were added to Tekrati’s Directory of Analyst Blogs, a freely available directory. Those with valid feeds are included in the OPML. Some are “new” blogs, some are well established and only recently came to my attention.

The November additions are:

Company: Common Sense Advisory
Localization Industry 411
Global Watchtower

Company: Enderle Group
The Real Truth about Technology and IT

Company: Forrester Research
Annoying Design (I’m having problems validating the feed)
Forrester Applications and Program Management Council (Forrester restricted access after this blog was listed)
Forrester Infrastructure and Operations Council (Forrester restricted access after this blog was listed)

Company: Freeform Dynamics
Open Reasoning

Company: GT&A Strategic Marketing
NewMediaWise

Company: Illuminata
The Pervasive Datacenter

Company: iLocus Research
iLocus

Company: Info-Tech Research Group
Attic Dust (I know, need to give Michael his own listing.)

Company: JupiterResearch
Zia Daniell Wigder
John Lovett

Company: Longhaus
The Naked Chief Blog (I’m having problems validating the feed)

Company: Security Incites
Security Mike’s Blog
The Mike Rothman Security Report

Company: TEC
The TEC Blog
Foro Empresarial

Company: Wikibon
Storage Takeaways

Heads up: In 2008, “stealth” deletions from the Tekrati Analyst Blogs Directory come to an end. Instead, inactive and disappeared blogs will roll over to an archive (purgatory?) of sorts.

Analyst surveys often seem to quantify the obvious. That seemed to be the case recently, when Forrester revealed that most of its analysts don’t like using walled-garden AR portals on vendor websites. Not surprising — few people like to register for content. That’s why we have things like BugMeNot and Anonymous Cowards.

Yet, a debate of sorts rose up around this point among some of the AR bloggers. Anonymous AR bloggers at the ARmadgeddon blog took issue with the Forrester thumbs-down on AR portals, and cited agreement from a Hill & Knowlton AR expert. They believe access to privileged vendor content justifies access hassles.

Aren’t AR portals a bit retro? We’re well into the Web 2.0 and UGC window, and it has implications for AR just as it does for everything else. Some AR pro’s — like Catherine Helzerman and Skip MacAskill — are willing to experiment in Second Life while they keep the conventional paradigm running. Many more are turning onto blogging. Meanwhile, fundamental changes are already beginning to appear out in the mainstream — in press rooms, websites, collaboration environments.

So here’s what I would do instead of investing in a legacy walled-garden AR portal. Start-ups, multinationals — doesn’t matter.

First, collaborate with my media relations colleagues. Focus on making sure the online press room is properly designed and always freshly stocked with content. The idea is to create a high-value reference resource with documents, audio, video, photos, contact information, blog links, archives, targeted search, email alerts, and feeds. For help with priorities, check out TEKgroup International’s free annual study on what journalists want in a corporate press room. (Caveat: high tech represents less than 15% of respondents this year.)

Next, collaborate with my corporate web teams to make sure company websites and site maps support the way that analysts perform online research. Embed supplemental content, links, keywords, titles, tags, share widgets, and feed opt-ins right on the very product and services pages where analysts are likely to land. Use SEO techniques to optimize content visibility within the corporate websites and beyond — in search engines, bookmarking sites, aggregation sites. Informal testing with hand-picked analysts can really help.

Last step: start looking at Web 2.0-style collaboration tools for sharing my proprietary content with analysts on the fly. Shared spreadsheets, wikis, chatrooms, videoconferencing - the list of choices is awesome. A good place to start looking is the Office 2.0 Conference website.

I’ve played a bit with the free Compete site analytics tool, motivated into action by another Compete service coming out of beta this week. Website analytics is one indicator of the popularity — and hence, influence — of industry analyst companies, based on their public-facing websites.

Compete caught my eye because it claims to “triangulate” user-generated content from its own army of cookie-carriers with info from service providers and other sources. Sounds good, doesn’t it? It addresses one of my concerns with Alexa — its limited approach to statistics-gathering.

I tried this simple query, comparing Forrester, Gartner and Corporate Executive Board. Compete shows Forrester far ahead of Gartner — in visits, people, engagement, etc. The gap is 2:1 or higher, on several of the metrics. Overall, Forrester has a 10,000-point lead on Gartner in ranking against the top 1 million websites. Compete hadn’t gathered enough data on CEB.

For comparison, here’s the same query on Alexa.

So, is Forrester.com really wiping the floor with Gartner.com? I’m not so sure.

We each need to draw our own conclusions about the accuracy of Compete, just as we did with Alexa and other user-generated metrics. What’s great is that we’re being given more and more choices in analytics, complete with well-designed features, speedy response times, easy exports — and the lowest possible price.

What is a blog? How would you define an industry analyst blog? What separates blogs from the other online destinations and channels published by the ICT analyst community? Is a blog still a blog without an RSS feed? comments? Is an analyst blog tied to his or her expertise? Yesterday, I asked ten or so analysts and consultants in the US and UK to share their thoughts on what is a blog. They responded with free-range thinking on that and beyond: what is an analyst blog, why do analysts blog, and why does anyone care. Good stuff. Here’s a rough cut of my notes.

Background

My intent is to overhaul the criteria for the Tekrati analyst blogs directory. Already, the conversation offers a rich perspective on grounds for deciding which blogs are listed and why they might be tossed out down the road.

I queried analysts and consultants that are successful bloggers: each has a track record as an individual blogger, and has earned credibility as a thought leader within a professional community of practice.

The analysts are: Carl Howe of Blackfriars Communications, Mike Gotta of Burton Group, Alan Pelz-Sharpe of CMS Watch, Charlene Li or Josh Bernoff (Josh responded) of Forrester Research, Dale Vile of Freeform Dynamics, James Governor of RedMonk, John Blossom of Shore Communications, and Stowe Boyd of The Brannan Street Irregulars.

The consultants are: Jen McClure of the Society for New Communications Research, Jonny Bentwood of Edelman, and Erik SR of Tech for PR.

Again, what follows is a rough cut of the discussion threads. I’m pulling excerpts out of the conversational flow, to make for faster reading. More, and perhaps a little more polished, next week.

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The Tekrati directory of analyst blogs is easier to use, offers more information and is better integrated with its sister directories, on analysts and analyst firms. What’s more, we migrated the OPML to the latest rev and did an extensive housecleaning on the listings. Richard handled the programming effortlessly, as always. I, on the other hand, am still wrestling with a content issue: new rules for separating a blog from any other form of online journal or commentary. I’m asking for help.

You might be thinking that I’m a little slow on the draw, given that I’m just now pondering the universal truths of Blog, some two and half years into publishing a directory of blogs.

Since the 2005 directory debut, my rule has been this: there must be evidence of blog publishing software and/or blog coding and format standards. That’s what split the blogwashers — my term for analysts using web pages that mimic a blog in a cosmetic way — from the bloggers. Only the bloggers that passed this test made it into the directory.

Fast forward to 2007. I’m feeling increasingly self-conscious about this technology-only premise, and that’s not a good thing. More web content seems to be a hybrid, a blend of blog and other content publishing applications. This results in too much dithering on my part. And, I don’t like to guess. Whether a blog is in or out of the directory should be a simple decision. It should not be subjective. (Other elements are subjective, as it is, like who is and who is not an analyst. That’s another conversation.)

What to do? I don’t think that adding more technology to my filtering criteria is the right approach. After all, any kind of page can be turned into an RSS feed, lots of publishing systems allow reader comments, lots of blog templates perform like traditional websites, and lots of analyst blogs don’t accept comments or have feeds that don’t validate.

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As professional opinion leaders and market experts, industry analysts face three key challenges as bloggers: credibility, relevance and passion. Tekrati explores these challenges and how different analyst groups address them, as we continue this special report on industry analyst blogs. Related stories offer in-depth comments from selected analysts, and a reading list that links directly to analyst commentary on blogs and RSS.
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