Thursday, October 19, 2006
Thoughts on Analysts at Forrester
Mike Rothman made an interesting comment in his blog and said the following:
Good analysts need to be advocates. We are working on behalf of someone, preferably an end user. What value does an analyst provide that cannot weigh in and provide opinion about strategy? And analysts are always evangelizing whatever it is they are working on. If they don't have some big idea, what's the use?
Somebody please tell me how to get any analyst firm to be an advocate? I have been on my pulpit evangelizing why enterprises need to pay attention to XACML, telling stories about how the Liberty Alliance is incomplete and needs a different perspective on federated identity and have even offered up opportunities for industry analysts to do case studies on our own enterprise in the space of application rationalization, building compliance-oriented architectures and so on with absolutely zero response.
Is Mike Rothman full of it or he simply is on to something and it will just take ten lifetimes for analysts to catch up. Anyway, I learned that vendors can buy quotes from industry analysts for only $1000. Maybe I could get the folks over at Intalio to buy some in the BPM space. Maybe even James Robertson for SmallTalk and the Ruby Community could use this tactic to get enterprisey folks to pay attention to dynamic languages...
