Answers to Questions asked by Analyst Relations Professionals

Last week, I put out a message on Twitter asking analyst relations professionals what would they like to know about end customers and our interactions with industry analyst firms. I received two great questions and figured I would share the answers publicly...



Ksenia Coffman asked: How do end customers of analyst firms perceive "magic quadrants" on the scale from "pay-per-play exercise" to "bible"

Historically Magic Quadrants, Waves and other similar comparisons provided immense value in a world filled with expensive proprietary vendor offerings. Increasingly, there value is decreasing for a variety of reasons ranging from the increased adoption of open source to leverage software-as-a-service and other considerations.

Magic quadrants and their industry equivalents typically compare vendors more than they compare products and makes it challenging to incorporate fair comparisons of proprietary and open source products. At the end of the day, a customer is looking for a solution to their challenge and want to learn about all possibilities and the current method sometimes takes viable open source product offerings off the table. Analysts are quick to promote the fallacy that many of their customers aren't that interested in open source but I think the reality of the marketplace speaks otherwise. In the world of open source, sometimes customers do care about having vendor support in which the quadrant approach may work and at other times customers don't feel the need to spend money on support. This is all contextual.

The key consideration for analyst firms when it comes to providing real value to their end customers when it comes to open source is to figure out a proxy for revenue in these types of reports. Since open source isn't based on selling licenses, the revenue lens is flawed at best. It would be my recommendation that analyst relations professionals encourage Gartner and Forrester to not arbitrarily defend their current practice of exclusion of non-commercial open source from Quadrants and Waves and to figure out how to change the measurement to allow for inclusion.

Another perspective on this question requires acknowledging that Quadrants and Waves have value at procurement time, but increasingly many end customers are acknowledging that they already have more software than they need. Nowadays, with the emergence of enterprise software licenses where an enterprise may pay one fixed fee for all the software they can consume, the challenge is less about making a procurement decision than in how to properly leverage technology they already have. In this regard, end customers would benefit more from understanding technology from the perspective of a reference architecture, relevant industry standards and overall deployment best practices than they would from understanding overall market trends that are more popular with the vendor community.

Michael Myers asked: How much weight do end customers give to the analysts vs other sources of information?

The credence given by end customers to analysts does vary significantly based on who the analyst is and there is no consistency. I would say that credence tends to be given to analysts who are more practitioners who can go deep than analysts who just cover market trends. within the twitterati, the concept of the star analyst appears frequently and I can truly say that the analysts that are considered popular amongst the analysts themselves and the media at large aren't necessarily the ones that are most influential.

As an Enterprise Architect who spends a lot of time crafting PowerPoint, there are times where I need quotes and referencing an industry analyst is a popular tool in the toolbox. Some analysts are quotable but this doesn't make them influential. The inverse is also true. For example, Bob Blakely of Burton/Gartner has never been quoted in any of my PowerPoints but he happens to be one of the most influential analysts covering identity and privacy. In fact, he happens to have the distinct honor of having been referenced in my annual review.

Generally speaking, some parts of a PowerPoint presentation are marketing where you need a few obligatory quotes and some analysts are great at providing them. The hardest part is that you can't use search engines to tell which analysts have influenced the thoughts and minds of people and therefore many analysts use easy to gather metrics that otherwise are fundamentally flawed.

It is important to acknowledge that analysts are only one part of the equation and there are other factors at play. The analogy of the grass is always greener on the other side of the street (aka Jones) plays in the model of end customers as well. Not a day goes by where we aren't comparing ourselves to Progressive, Geico, Travelers and so on. Analysts can choose to increase their influence by providing their guidance in a vertical-specific context or more likely provide metrics/guidance that suffer from the lack of vertical focus. If the CIO of Walmart were talking to an analyst, would he care more about the industry trends at large or would he care more about what Target, Tesco and Dollar General were up to?

Other models of influence include reaching out to industry peers to get alternative perspectives. For example, if I wanted to find out not just what is good about a particular piece of technology but more of its operational characteristics (things that occur after procurement) what is the probability that analyst firms are going to provide me with insight when compared to say searching for the product name on LinkedIn and connecting to other users while avoiding going through the filtered vendor provided reference list?

Increasingly, there are many alternative sources of information that are freely available. While they may not be normalized they can in many cases be more insightful. So, what our industry peers are up to has a more profound effect on our decision making than analysts themselves, but the better question to ask is why aren't analysts helping end customers connect the dots. They need to acknowledge that they are no longer the center of "research" and need to embrace open source methods of analysis.

Star Analysts according to James McGovern: Part Two

In my previous blog entry, I commented on who I believe are the Top Fifteen Star Analysts. Today, I will provide insight into the common characteristics...



Below are six traits of star analysts...

Quantitative vs Qualitative
Some analyst firms are overly obsessed with metrics. While I too believe in the use of metrics to enable informed decisions, the vast majority of metrics captured by analyst firms have nebulous value to end customers. Consider the scenario where I am looking to purchase a relational database. Does knowing that Microsoft and Oracle are the top contenders from a metrics perspective add value to the conversation? Would it add more value if I were to see those metrics sliced and diced between industry verticals? For example, we know that Sybase is very popular on Wall Street but otherwise gets lost in the mix if you look outside of financial services. Let's face it, some products are generally applicable to all industry verticals while others tend to have an affinity to particular verticals. In order for metrics to be useful, analysts would need to provide more of a dynamic way of allowing customers to get customized metrics. Otherwise, they are of questionable value.

Qualitative analysts on the other hand tend to do a lot better job of explaining a problem through the lens of a customer and not primarily reliant on the metrics they have captured in surveys. We all know that the grass is always greener in the neighbors yard and this scenario applies to enterprises as well. Should I care what 74.2% of the insurance companies at large are up to or do I really care more about what Travelers, Progressive and Geico are up to?

All of the analysts that made my list are masters of being qualitative and are able to provide deep insight not only on their particular coverage area but able to understand the industry vertical slice as well.

Abstraction can morph into distortion
The quantitative people will respond with the notion that sometimes a customer simply needs a number. I believe that sometimes a customer simply needs a name. Did you know that our media relations policy doesn't allow for me to be abstract in my communications with the outside world? I cannot hide behind the fact that I work for a Fortune 200 enterprise headquartered in the Northeast. I must use my company's name. Which of the below phrases do you feel is more informative:

• I had a conversation with several insurance carriers in the Midwest regarding X
• I had a conversation with several insurance carriers including Geico, Selective, State Farm and Progressive. One of them indicated that they are using X

It is important to understand that a customer doesn't know whether you have done your research or are simply making it up on the fly. The later is more professional in that it shows that the person understood the question by not only responding with a technology answer, sliced and diced it not only to a particular industry vertical, but to specific companies in the vertical as well as gave you a credible hint as to how to satisfy your answer more deeply if needed all without violating the spirit of non-disclosure.

All of the analysts that made my list are masters of contextual name dropping without violating non-disclosure.

The Responsibility to be Social
All of the analysts that made my list are participants in a variety of social media forums ranging from Twitter to Facebook. This means that they are doing their part to keep an up to the minute pulse on the industry and what people are talking about. Waiting around for surveys and conferences in order to figure this out is minimally lazy and more than likely not timely.

If you observe an emerging trend before others, you are a true analyst. If you observe a trend after everyone else has already analyzed it, you are a historian. All of people on my list do not practice archaeology but are true observers, participants and most important amplifiers to those willing to take risks and lead.

Open Source
When in an enterprise setting, sometimes we are looking for a strategy around commercial vendors. At other times, we simply need to know the cheapest thing that can possibly work. Many analysts sit back and wait for vendors to schedule briefings with them. This behavior causes many analysts to not have visibility into viable open source product offerings. The best of the analysts do their own homework and don't wait for information to come to them.

All of the analysts on my list are literate when it comes to open source and follow all forms of software regardless of its cost or lack of.

The Buck doesn't stop at Procurement
The vast majority of analysts seems to spend less time understanding products and more time analyzing vendors. At some level, they are doing their end customers a big disservice. We all know that if an enterprise spends a million dollars on a product at procurement time, that we will spend order of magnitudes more throughout its lifecycle and therefore some focus on not just what it take to procure it but what should we do after the product has been purchased is in order.

Maybe the shortcoming of analysts who didn't make the list are the ones who were never practitioners and therefore wouldn't have a clue as to how to understand what occurs in an enterprise after it has been procured? With a few exceptions, the vast majority of analysts that made my list held senior-level IT positions in large enterprises at one point in their career. They weren't English majors who studied journalism and decided that being an analyst was more lucrative.

Briefings are Good, Conversations are Better
Sometimes there are burning questions that pop up out of nowhere within an enterprise. Do I really want to wait a week or two until the analyst is free in order to have a dialog? Sometimes you have a question that doesn't require a conversation and you simply need to be pointed in a better direction. This can be accomplished via thirty year old technology known as email. Sometimes when I ask a question, I fully expect a few links to come back and nothing more.

All of the analyst that made my list not only will communicate with end customers the way that end customers want to communicate, but they will usually maintain a relationship after a dialog has ended. The vast majority of analysts look at scheduled briefings as being transactional and miss the importance of building a relationship. I really like it when an analyst sends me a link that contains something of interest to me especially when I wasn't expecting it. This shows that the analyst isn't just interested in achieving some arbitrary internal metrics set by his firm but is interested in a long term relationship.

The Secret Relationship between Enterprise Architecture and Outsourcing: Part Three

Many believe that enterprise architecture is all about strategy & planning where outsourcing tends to focus on software development and/or operations. This level of abstraction hides many considerations. The touchpoints are much deeper than the handoffs as you transition into the software development lifecycle...



The vast majority of enterprise architects have never thought deeply about how they can make their employer more successful in outsourcing work to other countries. In my experience, outsourcing fails because there may not be an adequate feedback loop into future strategy and planning.

One of the worst practices is to believe the hype that an outsourcing firm has the same capabilities for delivering as an in-house team. Common sense may dictate that someone who has been in the same enterprise for twenty years will obviously know many things better than someone in another location who knows nothing about your culture and may even be considered a senior developer even though they have been in IT for only three years.

Let's face it, the skillset of the average offshore resource is lower and therefore your strategies must adjust to accomodate. Anyone can take a team of experienced people and lead them to a successful outcome, but it takes not only a thoughtful strategy that acknowledges a reduced skillset but also a team that is willing to do the emotional labor required to make outsourcing work.

It is painfully obvious that way too many employees complain about the lack of skills in the outsourcing firms, but this is simply stating the obvious. What enterprise architecture teams need to noodle is how to help those who may not yet be capable of running on their own be successful.

The strategy of outsourcing is liking teaching your five year old how to ride a bicycle. There will be many accidents, bruises, cuts and scrapes but sooner or later they will learn to ride a bicycle. Maybe in ten or so years, they may even be world champion cyclists.

The journey to successful outsourcing is long and in order for it to be successful requires the enterprise architecture team to commit to long term strategies and emotional labor in order to make it successful. The definition of long term in this context may require thinking past five years...