"We were dead wrong"

Trust a fellow ex-analyst (Chris Selland ex Yankee, Aberdeen) to pounce when I acknowledged "we were dead wrong" at Gartner (Chris, I will get you with some really hot food when we next go to dinner!).

I would be remiss to not point out at other times we were also DEAD RIGHT at Gartner. One of my proudest moments as a Gartner analyst was when we (thanks to Erik Keller's persistence) called that the ERP market would slow down due to Y2K drivers in 98, not 99. We were hearing from many CIOs their "batten down" plans. Wall Street, other analysts, even Gartner Y2k analysts, the vendors disagreed with us, but we stuck to it.

The key there was we were in touch with the buyers. My issue with the analyst model today is it is too passive and often out of touch with buyers - see my blog Influence v/s Intelligence.

So, why did we get it wrong in 1998 around services vendors taking the mantle of IT leadership? The numbers certainly supported us...the services spend around ERP and Y2K was already pretty high. We also knew buyers were unhappy (That year I co-authored a major report titled "Application Implementation Consultants - Over priced, Over hyped, Over worked". The report started with ""A Michelangelo should not charge Sistine Chapel rates for painting a farmer's barn," once ruled a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Although the ruling in this case related to lawyer's fees, it might well have related to a systems integrator's (SI's) fees on an application implementation project")

What we underestimated was just how unhappy buyers were - it did not completely ripple through till 2001. The effect was dramatic. PwC sold to IBM at one fifth of what it was planning to sell to HP. We all know what happened to the Scients and Viants. All the majors - EDS, CSC, Bearingpoint, Deloitte etc have had a rough last few years. The offshore vendors have done well, but are still a small percent of the market. So, yes I have no problems saying we were wrong to project this group was going to take over leadership of the IT industry.

OK, I promise no more backward looking stuff....I look forward to that dinner with Chris...