At Forrester’s Enterprise Architecture Forum 2009, attendees will learn how their EA program can build their digital business with the technologies and architecture practices that drive innovation and create business value.

In addition to 15 of Forrester’s industry-leading analysts, featured industry speakers include:

• Bhaskar Banerjee, Vice President, Enterprise Architecture, Fidelity Investments
• Jeanne Ross, Director and Principal Research Scientist, MIT Center for Information Systems Research
• Hub Vandervoort, Chief Technology Officer, Progress Software
• Dan Ziman, Creator of “Greg the Architect” and Director, Marketing Programs, Lithium Technologies

WHEN: February 10-11, 2009

WHERE:
Doral Golf Resort & Spa
4400 N.W. 87th Avenue
Miami, FL 33178

Forrester Research forecasts global purchases of IT goods and services by businesses and governments will decline by 3 percent in 2009 to $1.66 trillion.

For IT vendor strategists, the global IT market will be a gloomy one in 2009, with prospects of improvement in 2010. Unlike in past years, there are no significant growth markets to offset the weak ones.
– Andrew Bartels, Forrester Research

As always, the picture is worse for some than others. Software spending stays flat. Communications equipment and global IT services and outsourcing both decline by about 3 percent. Computer equipment spending drops by 4 percent.

Forrester Research’s Kevin Lucas raises a good question: what core corporate business value can your analyst relations program deliver? His point is that AR programs shouldn’t commit to delivering sales value unless there’s good reason to do so. As logical as that advice may sound, I don’t agree with it.

Analyst relations programs can be designed to deliver on a wide range of business objectives. There’s no reason to shy away from aligning AR with the customer purchase decision process. In fact, that has been the basis of the analyst business — and analyst relations — since the late 80s.

What you can’t do, is bolt sales performance expectations onto an existing AR program. Objectives are fundamental to how you design, staff, fund and measure an AR program.

A legacy AR program — perhaps focused primarily on what’s said during a conference, or improving where your dot is placed on quadrants — is not going to shorten sales cycles tomorrow because somebody issues an edict today.

The magic wand scenario just doesn’t fly.

That doesn’t mean that an AR program can’t deliver sales value. It means that delivering sales value will take time. It will take intention. It will take planning.

Kevin asks a good question. It’s up to each of us to come up with a good answer.

Republished from my Influencer50 blog, Sway.

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.

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.

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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