RSSTrends and Analysts
The big industry analyst firms such as Gartner, Forrester, and IDC sometimes seem to exist primarily as a large sieve through which new and innovative ideas generated at the coal face must pass through and be approved by in order to gain traction in the rarified atmosphere of business and IT management. Although it sometimes seems that these analysts spend most of their time either re-hashing old ideas or creating controversy where none exists, in fact they fill a necessary role in the evolution of idea from mote to best practice. It's the same role that most consultants fill, that of an independent check on internal forces, a name brand that the suits can trust to tell them the same things that the guys in the trenches have been saying for years. Whether you regard this state of affairs as unfortunate or not (I have mixed feelings; after all, I'm a consultant) it's hard to argue that's not how things work in the industry today.
Tomorrow may be a different story; the business executives who comprise the largest part of the audience may find that they simply don't have a great deal of control left over the dispersion of IT spending in their organizations. Users, who don't know Forrester from a hole in the ground, pick solutions based on mass market advertising and personal preference.
Today, my concern is to what extent analysts take those ideas out of context or confine them unnecessarily so that much of the good they might do is kept from the limelight. Some recent posts concerning the DevOps movement and Agile Operations have hinted at this outcome. At any point where folks twice removed from the actual physical work being performed start chewing it over (a problem that Agile takes on as a core obstacle) you run that risk. Nonetheless, how do you avoid, as a CIO, passing judgement over things with which you are not intimately and personally familiar? Opinions have to come from somewhere, and those you pay for seem like they ought to be more credible than most.
The credibility of IT analysts is not a new question. Financial motives other than the immediate exchange of dollars are always in play. It's not always easy to measure second and third order effects, even when you have all the facts (which we rarely do).
It may even be a less pertinent question today than in years past, considering other trending factors. But where there is a conflation of interests between organizations that rely on "Big IT" for their profits and new, lightweight approaches that de-emphasize the traditional IT department in business technology, you have to wonder how honest an opinion you are getting.
Happily, so far it seems that some analysts are more or less immune to the implications. Forrester's "Business Technology" push, Gartner's cautious embrace of DevOps and consumerized IT sourcing, are both positions that could be antithetical to the profit-taking mindset of consulting group management.
Does this indicate a level playing field for the assessment of these ideas? Perhaps; one likes to imagine that individual analysts do their best regardless. But at this stage, these things may simply be too small to offer much challenge to the status quo at the big firms. If that's the case, we may be seeing the best analysis now, and as traction is gained, more fiscally motivated opinion may rise to the surface.
