Enterprise Architecture: From Incite comes Insight...: Why Gartner Analysts Don't Blog...

Monday, September 03, 2007

Why Gartner Analysts Don't Blog...

I have been busy gathering the opinion of others as to why Gartner analysts en masse do not blog...

Figured I would list a couple of reasons. If you know of more, please do not hesitate to leave a trackback...

High Level Conversations: Gartner analysts are so used to having high-level conversations with their end-customer base being comprised of non-technical IT executives that they realize they aren't capable of providing the detail level of insight required to be credible within the blogosphere. Many bloggers simply would ignore the regurgitation of common sense. Sure, common sense is uncommon but that doesn't mean we should spend money hearing it.

Consider the following phrases such as it is important for IT to have strong business buy-in or make sure your projects have a positive ROI or even make sure you have strong business requirements as part of your strategy. If you ever so slightly remix these phrases, they have given many Gartner analysts lift while us bloggers may detect that something else is occurring.

Dialog: If you have been so indoctrinated into having one-way conversations, you probably have no clue as to how to have a conversation in which you don't control. The fear can sometimes be overwhelming or maybe the fear of transparency is stronger

Magic Quadrant: Some wise ass will come along and of course want to make a magic quadrant of all of the industry analyst bloggers where Gartner certainly wouldn't be in the leaders position. In fact, the avoidance of acknowledging that industry analyst bloggers such as James Governor, Stephen OGrady and Michael Cote would dominate. Even bloggers from Burton Group, Forrester and Entiva would amplify this quadrant making controlling the message difficult

throwing daggers: Someone may actually figure out how easy it is to be an analyst. I have always said that I can be an industry analyst for Gartner on any topic and do so without actually researching something. The first thing that I would do is to limit briefings to 1/2 hour. I would most certainly dial into each call, a couple of minutes late and apologize profusely for doing so. I would then use the Peter Covey tactic of seek first to understand, then to be understood by asking the end customer to provide an overview of their problem space. Hopefully, I can count on them rambling for a good fifteen minutes especially if there are multiple participants on the call. I would then enumerate all the vendors that play in this space and sort the list by whomever paid me the most money. Likewise, I would exercise my right to remain silent on any open source offerings as they wouldn't generate any money for me. I would use the remaining five minutes to remix the phrases outlined in the first bullet and then proceed to let folks know that I have to leave a little early in order to make it to the next call

Analyst Relations: Folks such as Barbara French may lose business because her customers may realize that the notion of analyst relations feels more like spoonfeeding a baby and not anything requiring any depth. She would have to change her business model to helping software vendors to speak in technobabble instead of value

Customers: The ombudsman listens to complaints but hasn't enabled trackback nor unmoderated comments. I suspect that bloggers such as John Domenichini and others may come out of the woodwork. Hugh would probably spend weeks drawing interesting cartoons and providing yet another perspective

So, what's your perspective as to why Gartner analysts aren't blogging?