Thursday, August 17, 2006
Service Oriented Consulting & Industry Analysis
For those who aren't aware, Brenda Michelson has started her own industry analyst firm. In the spirit of transparency, she has laid out how rules of engagement. Imagine what would happen if the large analyst firms did the same...
I predict that Brenda will be wildly successful because she has a real value proposition for the enterprise. She has taken the best principles of industry analysis from the folks at Redmonk but actually managed to navigate away from the vendor-oriented hey not another product we don't need mindset that is so pervasive amongst analysts. It is somewhat easy to sit back and be briefed by vendors but to figure out truly what enterprises need independent of products solving a particular problem, requires one to actually do some analysis.
There are several topics that industry analysts simply haven't covered in the past but that she will more than likely be all over. Imagine if analysts starting covering some of the below spaces:
Anyway, I hope that others within the enterprise will read and more importantly support the valuable work that Brenda is attempting to pursue. I know that she has my attention...
| | View blog reactionsI predict that Brenda will be wildly successful because she has a real value proposition for the enterprise. She has taken the best principles of industry analysis from the folks at Redmonk but actually managed to navigate away from the vendor-oriented hey not another product we don't need mindset that is so pervasive amongst analysts. It is somewhat easy to sit back and be briefed by vendors but to figure out truly what enterprises need independent of products solving a particular problem, requires one to actually do some analysis.
There are several topics that industry analysts simply haven't covered in the past but that she will more than likely be all over. Imagine if analysts starting covering some of the below spaces:
- Enterprises not only use open source but also contribute. Imagine if the story was told about Duke Energy and their .NET framework or Merrill Lynch and their contributions to the message queuing space or even Morgan Stanley and the variety of projects they allow their employees to work on while on the clock. There are lots of contributors to open source but no one wants to tell the story of companies that are doing valuable work especially when technology isn't their primary focus.
- Todd Biske mentioned this notion of IT and Business driven SOA. The funny thing is that industry analysts and the media have keyed in on something that doesn't matter. It is never IT vs the business. They are continiums, nothing more, nothing less. I suspect that in many corporations that have had an IT practice for say 40 years that over time the knowledge of the business is more embedded within IT systems than in any particular business persons head. I defy most enterprises to gather all the business folks together to write a spec to create a new system where the results will come out exactly the same as what they currently run. IT is the business.
- Maybe Brenda will also cover innovation. Not the usual babble of consumer-driven innovation but how many EA organizations that truly have incorporated innovation into their fabric are actively pursuing patents and even giving away innovation to their competitors to help with pervasive problems in the industry in which there is no competitive advantage.
- My dream would be for her to cover the pervasive problem of lack of strong technical leadership within today's enterprises. For example, being an IT employee from an organization chart perspective is not the same as being an IT professional. When these two takes started skewing if you could chart, it would align very nicely with the rise of IT expense in the industry as a whole.
Anyway, I hope that others within the enterprise will read and more importantly support the valuable work that Brenda is attempting to pursue. I know that she has my attention...
