BSI - Big Swinging Independence

In the analyst/blogger/media world we have periodic flare-ups of “who’s more independent”. Nothing gets resolved but a few weeks later it flares up again.

Independence to me represents many shades of grey. When I joined Gartner from Price Waterhouse I asked about the independence forms I needed to sign. At accounting firms you had to annually disclose (and often divest) investments where the firm had an audit relationship. At Gartner the rules (at least in the 90s) were much less formal. On the other hand accounting firms were helping on all kinds of software evaluations and not disclosing to clients their implementation revenues from specific software vendors. Was one more “independent” than the other?

It’s a buyer’s judgment call. I have always respected clients who do quick diligence around my firm’s independence. That’s where the call needs to be made. To help them we have an independence policy for our blogs and all our sponsors have badges on the blogs for all to see. 

In turn, we vet potential sponsors and the vast majority are by my invitation. Our sponsors, in turn, have been meticulously respectful of our independence. They know not to ask us to influence any buyer consulting engagements. They also do not ask for any confidential information from competing vendors. If you are planning a commercial relationship with my firm, I am always happy to have a thorough independence discussion.

On the other hand if you just want to glibly just talk about bias or about lack of independence as some vendors or analysts like to do, I wish they would in our age of Big Data run analytics on my 8,000 searchable blog posts over 9 years. And if they persist with their idle talk, don’t be surprised to see me tweet “If you are convinced we operate that way, how dumb are you to not spend a small amount on sponsoring our  blogs?”  That usually shuts them up.

At least till the next round of BSI bragging :)