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by becoming the first person to send me a detailed assessment of the free Tekrati firms directory — including some outdated links, links/nomenclature we disagree on, and links/companies I hadn’t heard of.

Canopus Research and Strategy Analytics stirred up some buzz this week with new research services focused on virtual worlds. It brings up some interesting implications for analyst relations.

Before we go any further: I have no Second Life presence. I don’t even qualify as a n00b. I’m just calling it like I see it, from out here.

First, the latest buzz:

Canopus Research is building a field office in Second Life. This came to my attention via Canopus Research’s page on Facebook, where Will Zachmann posted a photo album of his SL field office and Mr. Arifi Saeed, “Research Director, SL”.

Meanwhile, Strategy Analytics is venturing into virtual worlds in pursuit of metrics. They’re out to benchmark the virtual world critical success factors, like perceived engagement and expected time spent. This caught my attention via a press release featuring a color photo of Wett Mopp, “Virtual World Analyst”.

What are some of the implications for analyst relations?

1. You don’t need to join virtual worlds to find analysts with presence, but vetting them may be a challenge. You can figure out who’s where by tapping your social networks, formal business comms, feeds, offline networks. Figuring out who has street credibility in a virtual world, let alone across multiple platforms, is a different kettle of fish.

2. Avatars are already part of the analyst landscape. This raises questions around transparency — for clients, research subjects, and analysts alike. Historically, hidden identities and multiple identities have been hallmarks of virtual environments.

3. Nobody knows (yet) how virtual worlds will change analyst services. Research needs are emerging. Analysts are experimenting with coverage areas and office locations. Some are temporary: Brandon Hall added an SL office for its 2007 conference registration. Others are intended to last.

4. It’s feeling like last call for early adopters. Anyone lusting for First and Only claims on virtual world stuff had best saddle up!

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.

Nathan Gilliatt has an interesting model for using RSS to “aggregate and redistribute market intelligence,including analyst research subscriptions, inside the corporate firewall.” He calls it IDS, or Intelligence Delivery System. Analysts are just one source category.

What I like most about his IDS model is that it enables an organization to bring together diverse information in a stable repository and strip out the costs and chaos of things like internal portals, applications and multiple 3rd party content aggregators. To be sure, I’m a fan of these tools and services today. Whatever limitations they present, they provide capabilities that many organizations simply could not justify building for themselves.

Where I disagree with IDS is the emphasis on importing and RSS for herding analyst research content. Some of the most valuable analyst content is delivered in formats that are not RSS-friendly — such as graphics, spreadsheets, databases, video, and interactive tools. Increasingly, content will be delivered in mutiple languages and with role, industry, and regional context.

Robust search applications seem the more promising way forward, for analyst research consumers and analysts alike.

Hat tip to Vinnie Mirchandani for starting this discussion.

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.

Carter Lusher announced he is departing HP. Adding to HP’s loss of voice in the AR community, no one will be taking the reigns of the HP Corp AR blog. Instead, it will be discontinued.

The AR community also saw the departure of Jonathan Yarmis from his high profile AR position at Hill & Knowlton, earlier this year.

On the PR/AR blogging front, Jonny Bentwood lamented earlier today about the recent loss of high profile PR bloggers.

I’ll be interested to see who steps up to take the places of these AR statesmen.

Meanwhile, enjoy your time off, gentlemen. And, stay in touch.

Update Nov 12: AMR Research has brought Jonathan onboard as a vp (Tekrati story).

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.

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.

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.

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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