The Analyst Transparency Workgroup

A new body called the Analyst Transparency Workgroup announced today that Forrester, AMR Research, Yankee Group  -- and the big surprise -- Gartner, will be participating in discussion on how users can "access their favorite analysts across all paper, proprietary and RSS feed platforms and can seamlessly compare and collate their views on technology subjects and tags."

Ok, got you.

But the thought was inspired by Forrester analyst Charlene Li's blog on the new Data Portability Workgroup where Google, Plaxo, Facebook are discussing how to allow common user access to their friends and media.

I happened to scroll down her page and check her blogroll. Only Forrester blogs listed. That is so 90s. At Gartner we similarly never mentioned any other analysts or trade rags. But in today's linked world? As it turns out, though they do not much to link to at the competition.

Take AMR. No blogs, but at least Bruce Richardson has a weekly on-line column. But only his latest column is freely available on-line. The rest only available to paying clients.

Take Yankee. Average of one blog a month.

Take Gartner's Ombudsman blog where they promise "an open and frank discussion on topics related to Gartner's analytical independence, accuracy, and integrity". Last post - November 2006!

Come on guys. Putting up 1-2% of your research will not kill your business model. In fact it will increase traffic. And acknowledging your competition, a trade pub, a blogger will not kill your business model either. Should actually make your user experience richer.

In the meantime, folks like Barbara French and John Sun do a great job summarizing latest analyst research. They are the Analyst Transparency Workgroup. But even they cannot work miracles. They can point to the research, but you still cannot get past the firewall.

Comments

[Jason Corsello]

Vin-

I actually tried to push forward with a blogging strategy at one of the named vendors last year. It was painful and I ultimately waved the white flag. The challenge is 1) most of the research firms themselves have a legacy IT infrastructure (funny...don't they adopt the stuff they write about...but I digress) and find it challenging to "integrate" a blogging platform, 2) to the firms credit, they exhaust alot of effort on editorial, fact-checking, etc. and those are typically ignored in blogging, 3) the question of who should blog is challenging...just because one is a good analyst doesn't mean they will be a good blogger...I think there is an art and science around blogging, 4) most good analysts I know already have an overflowing plate and to mandating for them to begin blogging would be unrealistic, and 5) most long-standing analysts (particularly at the big G) either already have their individual brand established and either don't think they need to blog, don't care about blogging, and won't know the first thing about making it sustainable. I think you have to care and be passionate about it to make it successful.

My 1.5 cents....

[vinnie mirchandani]

Jason, it does not have to be blogs ...it could be summary articles, event notes - whatever 1-2% of research to get in to the digital conversation flow with media and bloggers.....as another post I made said nowadays some readers only check what shows in their RSS readers

[Nathan Gilliatt]

On the RSS front, are any of the big companies delivering their proprietary research via RSS yet? In my experience on the client side, subscriptions to many services were underutilized because of the hassle in finding the useful bits scattered across multiple web sites. A secured RSS feed into an enterprise RSS server would make it much easier to work with.

I think we have two topics intermingled here. One is the public connectedness, and the other is creating a mechanism for clients to merge data from competing sources.

[Barbara French]

You stopped me dead in my Technorati tracks, alright! Good one! Thanks!

You've raised so many points, and many are worth a debate of their own.

To Nathan's point: the mechanisms for merging "competing" subscriptions include Northern Light and some other corporate content management systems. These solutions are not cheap, and none that I have found cover many firms.

[Phil Fersht]

The was some interesting discussion on Jason Busch's site Spendmatters about "Analyst / Blogger" fusion. I think some of the best bloggers today are former (or current) analysts. Whereas many non-analyst bloggers are great at delivering and reporting content (especially tactical IT stuff), good analysts are very adept at adding opinions, controversy and personality into their coverage. Yes, there are some great bloggers who can do this too (note Thomas O actually went the whole hog and joined Gartner), but we should see more analyst action in blogging, even if it's a small % of their coverage as VM suggests. Conversely, I have seen some not-so-good analysts try and blog and not been impressed with the outcome. Blogging is a great outlet for research snippets and surely it's only a matter of time before the analyst firms get it together... the customers are increasingly demanding it!

PF

[James Governor]

we don't need a workgroup to be transparent. what firewall?

[Dennis Howlett]

To the technical issues raised by a couple of commenters - this is a blind. I'm working on a project where there are multiple data sources but provided things can be rendered to XML then RSS is a snap. There are plenty of services around the 'conversion' issue and they are ludicrously cheap - not expensive. But then maybe the consultants coming in are taking revenge. Who knows?

We're looking at a combination of enterprise class RSS and search as the way to go for an organization with many 000's of pages, 130K people. It's a big task. But it isn't the cost or technical nightmare some correspondents think.

Goes to show how up to date the analyst industry really is?

[Barbara French]

Dennis, Technology has made this possible for years now, and at cheap prices. However, this is not a technology issue. It's a digital content licensing issue. That's the root of the high costs and lipid solutions. Sounds a bit like the trouble with music labels, doesn't it?

[Carter Lusher]

Hi Vinnie,

Interesting post. There are a few reasons why the major analyst firms are not aggressively moving on blogs, RSS and other approaches:

a) Culture – The major firms are not use to being open and being part of a public dialog

b) Business model – The majors think that every word should be paid for

c)Lagging adopters of technology – Ironically, the major IT analyst firms are quite conservative when it comes to actually using technology, often to the frustration of their analysts.

d) Metrics – Analysts are not measured or rewarded on their participation in social media.

Others from your point-of-view?

None of these are insurmountable issues for the major firms, but they are not going to be easy to change.

Cheers, -carter j

BTW, I linked to this post at Reading List for January 24, 2008

[vinnie mirchandani]

Carter, SageCircle redux! Thanks for comment ...we should catch up.