Enterprise Architecture: From Incite comes Insight...

The folks over at ARmadgeddon commented on Taxonomizing Open Source Analysis which was good but needs some refinement...



Here are some of the quotes along with my perspective:

end-user clients often cite the main reason for using Gartner is that it provides a one-stop-shop for research covering most IT and business topics.

First, we need to deconstruct the meaning of one-stop shop from an enterprise perspective. It does mean the following:

• From a procurement/contracts perspective, there is only one agreement and one flat fee.
• From an end-users perspective, the terminology used is consistent. For example, take the word open source. Some analyst firms will stay more pure and use the ten principles outlined at Opensource.org while others will use whatever definition is supplied by the vendor. Consistency across analysts is important.

Now, lets also talk about what one-stop shop doesn't mean:

• We desire to have one place to submit requests for briefings.
• We desire to force all of our requests through a single internal coordinator because of the notion of a seat.

If there is simply a web-site that outlines who to contact for a given topic, that is sufficient. I would never recommend that in order for this to work that we customers need a human to route our calls. Likewise, the notion of a "seat" is fugly. We deal with lots of analyst firms where the seat notion forces me to interact first with an internal contact who submits the request to the analyst firm. This simply creates additional expense on our part. I like the way the folks at the Burton Group operate as it doesn't constrain on our side who can establish a dialog. Likewise, getting a credential to download whitepapers is simple.

Take it as a call to the Open Source Analyst community: it should organise itself to provide a single-source (research) distribution (channel).

It is my thought that distribution should be made more organized but not necessarily research. In fact, I would probably argue against it. For example the notion of a Quadrant or Wave is useful in terms of me filtering down a list of vendors to invite in for a proof of concept and is primarily targeted at IT executives and non-technical software architects (A pervasively implemented oxymoron in enterprise environments). Other analyst firms provide insight at a detailed level and simply target a different audience. Normalization could alienate one demographic.

The idea is not new and implies agreeing on a taxonomy, possibly working together on research pieces, vetting in/out members, etc... .

Let me state with passion that analyst taxonomies are evil. Taxonomies as used in the analyst space tend to be how analysts classify vendors which in many cases is not how we customers use technology. It wouldn't be too difficult to find a software vendor (or a hundred) that believe they are inappropriately classified by analysts. So if vendors and customers agree that taxonomies are evil, let's not go there. Let's instead figure out better mechanisms for tagging.

The notion of working together on research pieces seems interesting at some level but I think regardless of whether that happens or not, I would love to at least see analysts reference the work of others. The only analyst I have seen that has done this has been Brenda Michelson of Elemental Links. This is incredibly transparent of here and does wonders for her credibility...