Analyst reports: How to read them
Posted by Felix Enescu on January 19th, 2007
The short answer: with your eyes wide open.
The long answer:
Like many of my CIO colleagues, I am a big consumer of analyst services.
Silicon Valley Guy put it very well:
IT managers simply do not have the time or energy to systematically gather information including talking to many of their peers, vet blogs for accuracy and synthesize conclusions. So tens of thousands IT organizations outsource market, product and management technique research to analysts just like they outsource PC help desk outsourcing, hardware break/fix and janitorial work. Why do 20 or 40 hours of research when you can read a couple of research notes and do a 30-minute phony inquiry? Yeah, they might be cutting corners, but that’s life.
Still….your analyst (be it Gartner, Forrester, AMR or whatever) report is not the holy book. You can question your analyst conclusions; you can question whether or not they apply to your country or your industry.
Do your own homework: learn about your company, learn about your country and your region, learn about your industry, and talk to your close peers.
Don’t get scared by “the brave new world” and the “unprecedented speed of change”. The ground rules of management still apply!
Read the ARmadgeddon blog from time to time, and join (or start) your local CIO Council.
January 20th, 2007 at 1:56 am
CIOs should also be encouraged to read the blogs of others that at least work within an enterprise context. This is a lot different than reading the blogs of vendors…
January 22nd, 2007 at 10:43 am
Right!
Unfortunately there are very few CIO blogs… Luckily there are some enterprise architects blogs (as I saw from your blogroll)
February 7th, 2007 at 6:20 pm
I believe that blogs are going to in the near future emerge as you most preferred source of information, it’s not going to happen overnight but over a period of time I am sure.
CIO-Councils are good, but may be as part of the site, you could set up a blog network / social bookmarking which would help them exchange information.
If interested along these lines, just send me a note maybe we can toss some ideas around on other possible options.
Also if possible it would be great if we set up sometime to have a call/email interview with you which i could host on my blog
Prashanth
February 28th, 2007 at 1:12 am
I’ve got one other suggestion for you. Share your comments about the analyst reports so that you can a least get a CIO’s perspective of their analysis.
I’m not a CIO, but I am a big consumer of IT analyst reports in my role as product marketer / product manager for IT vendors.
I started a blog with links to the latest IT analyst reports that are available for download for free (because it’s not always just a matter of time, a lot of us don’t have the budget to buy all the reports we need either) – these are typically links to the vendors that have purchased licenses to distribute the reports.
Please take a look – there’s something for everyone!
vantelo.com
March 1st, 2007 at 2:22 pm
Hi,
Thanks for the link. Indeed, many have misconception about research, especially about numbers. We’ve tried to document this at lenght on ARmadgeddon (links below).
On the other hand, the huge variability in research quality hides a constant improvement: analysts are getting better at cutting the hype and providing meaningful actionable recommendations for users. The downside is that research notes have become a bit less entertaintaining.
AR 101 series: the research process
AR Classics Series: Don’t Let Yourself be Misled by Analyst Bias
79.7% of all Gartner RAS statistics are made up
More on Analysts’ Data Sample Size