Well, ARmadgeddon asked… so please shoot ARonaut, not me. This is another one about The Borg. I suppose its a bit unfair to abstract from comments by Laura McLellan Gartner Research VP to the company’s corporate culture, but it seems telling that on a call last week:
She gave a quick round up on what analysts love most: face time, AR contact list (inc. responsibilities), announcement advance notice / pre-briefing and email opt-out.
She gave some insight on analyst psychology (gives a new meaning to analysing the analysts): they are motivated by influence and knowledge (explains the ego side) and turned off by community and reprocity (not sure what James will have to say on this).
Speaking for yourself and or Gartner, Laura? I will take the bait.
Many of the analysts I know actually like being part of a community. One of the real pleasures of the business is catching up with my peers at conferences and so on. Then there is reciprocity: in Europe, at least, sharing is not a problem, in fact its increasingly the way business gets done.
I work with folks at MWD, Sageza and Bloor occasionally. RedMonk works with Freeform Dynamics, as do other analyst firms. Justin positions IT-Analysis as a one stop shop for independent analyst research.
I do know some folks that prefer to be in ivory towers and never talk to anyone else, but I think they are increasingly the exception rather than the rule. The old days of 400 page reports are behind us.
If we’re talking mindset rather than a corporate line, I would argue many industry analysts like to share knowledge, they are the very definition of Gladwellian mavens, as per Brad Hunter’s pointer:
Mavens are the information gatherers of the social network. They evaluate the messages that come through the network and they pass their evaluations on to others, along with the messages. We can view mavens as regulators of the network because they have the power to control what flows through the network. We trust mavens, and this is especially important because their assessments can often make or break the tipping of an epidemic. Mavens drive many of our social institutions. They are the people who inform the better business bureau, regulate prices, write letters to senators, etc. in order that the rest of us don’t have to. Though Gladwell does not argue this explicitly, his description of mavens suggests that mavens can be specialized in areas of expertise and thus many of us may be mavens in our particular areas of interest.
Maven’s know that information only becomes truly valuable when it is shared. The maven’s ego is fed by the act of sharing. Gartner’s Nick Gall, for example, is fairly open to ideas and reciprocity. Brenda Michelson from PSG is a friend of RedMonk, we like her SOA thinking, as is Richard Monson-Haefel from Burton. Bill Zoellick at Gilbane is another sharer. Oh yeah lets not forget Zapthink.
Many individual analysts and firms like sharing and reciprocity, both RedMonk core values. We like to make a contribution.
To be fair to Laura, I regularly say that industry analysts are easy to work with once you realise they are 95% ego to 5% IQ…. a characterisation that some in the (non?)-community would certainly disagree with.
ARonaut says:
March 6, 2006 at 6:49 pm
James,
This is perhaps why the EMEA analysts are fun and nice to work with. They’re happy to discuss in a roundtable and their ego shows by the number of ideas they share. As opposed to some US Borg members who feel they’re too important to speak for free. BTW, it’s funny that ex.-META analysts have a different approach. Andy is the only Borg analyst to comment on ARmadgeddon. He’s ex. META and we think it’s not only a coiincidence.
Or is it independent analysts?
Anonymous says:
March 6, 2006 at 8:26 pm
A small correction, it’s Richard Monson-Haefel not Richard Monfael-Harris.
james governor says:
March 7, 2006 at 4:50 pm
sorry richard its actually a big correction. i actually checked that myself yesterday – and somehow didn’t make the fix.