The industry analyst business occasionally slips into what looks and feels suspiciously like testosterone-driven pushing and shoving. Gartner and Meta Group traditionally had strong red meat and fang cultures. With that in mind what struck me clearly when I saw the new list of practice directors in a Gartner reorganisation, according to ARmadgeddon, was that four of them are women.
- Mike Lafford: sourcing & vendor management (they wrote vendors, not IT providers 🙂
- Jane Doorly: security & privacy
- Jamie Popkin: business intelligence and information Management
- Joe Baylock: IT infrastructure and operations
- Val Sribar: applications management
- Jennifer Beck: business of IT (whatever that is)
- Bruce Bond: vertical industries (isn’t that a pleonasm?)
- Mike Harris: Dataquest (Gartner’s number-crunching bunch)
- Satoshi Yamanoi: Japan research
- Jenni Lehman: research operations (analyst’s bosses)
It may be that Gartner already had a strong women’s presence in its front line research management, but if so I just wasn’t aware of the fact. Suffice to say many of the industrys’ really solid analysts are women. Lets face it – who has the most testosterone should not be the deciding factor in any decision. If Gartner is to have less confrontational relationships with its vendor customers, this structure could be good news.
Ric says:
May 12, 2006 at 12:01 pm
James – thank you for “pleonasm” – it’s the first time I’ve come across it, and I will be on the lookout for the ealiest opportunity to use it myself.
The key queston for Gartner in my mind, is ‘can the women make Gartner more credible?’