Industry Analyst as Prophet 2

Many religious prophets are characterized by their vision of a world to come; but also by their bitter criticism of contemporary society and its leaders, and by righteous anger. Beware the angry prophet writes Jim West about the prophet Elisha, who cursed those who mocked his baldness.

In my previous post Industry Analyst as Prophet, I described prophecy as a combination of forecasting and evangelism. But some forms of prophecy also contain a strong element of righteous anger. Alongside the well-coiffured industry analyst firms that take money from vendors, there are also bald sites that constantly attack the large vendors and document the smallest perceived deviation from the path of righteousness.

Seaching the Internet for "who pays for prophecy", I found a bitter denunciation of both Gartner and Microsoft (Another Hopeful ‘Prophecy’ From the Gartner Group’s Paying Clients) on a website whose agenda is evident in its name: Boycott Novell. Microsoft seems to attract more than its fair share of this kind of attention - see for example Slated Antitrust.

Anyone who bases their understanding of the software industry on angry websites like these is clearly an idiot. When my son had a school project on Genetic Modification recently, we found websites that praised Monsanto and websites that denounced Monsanto as evil; I explained to my son that he could (probably should) reference anything he found, as long as he didn't take any of it at face value. There are certain companies that everyone likes to hate: when I was a student it was Barclays Bank; when I started in the software industry it was IBM; nowadays it is Walmart and Monsanto and of course Microsoft.

Obviously the same should apply to software industry analysis. The analyst should take nothing at face value: whether vendor marketing materials, or snide off-the-record remarks from other vendors, or wholesale denunciation from the vendor's enemies. The CIO who wants to exercise due diligence on a software vendor may ask an analyst if there are any competitors who should also be considered, but may also ask (expecting the answer no, but better to be safe than sorry) if there is anything on any of the denunciation websites that deserves any attention.

Given that this kind of check is a very small concern of many CIOs, it is surely more efficient and effective for many firms to share the costs of a trusted analyst wading through all this prophetic material, which saves everyone else the trouble. Is that a reasonable business model for industry analysis? Does that help answer the question: why should anyone pay for prophecy?

Industry Analyst as Prophet

@j4ngis (A Jangbrand) asks

What are "analysts"? Problem Solvers or Prophets? Long-term-researchers? Consultants? All of the above? All the time?

I think industry analysts generally think of themselves as modern secular prophets, providing a combination of forecasting and evangelism. According to Wikipedia, "prophets are regarded as having a role in society that promotes change due to their messages and actions". The Hebrew word for Prophet literally means Spokesperson - in other words, the prophet is an intermediary.

As Wikipedia explains, there may be issues with the authenticity of a prophet: it is suggested that some prophets may have been schizophrenic. For a modern technology analyst, the authenticity of the prophecy may be compromised to the extent that the analyst turns out to be merely a spokesman.

Bob Dylan wrote a song about prophecy, which could also be interpreted as a song about software industry analysis.

There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief.
None of them along the line, Know what any of it is worth.
There are many here among us, Who feel that SOA is just a joke.
Let us not talk falsely now, The hour is getting late.

So who is the joker and who is the thief?

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The future sounds like schizophrenia.

A Value Proposition for Industry Analysis

@mcgoverntheory Following my last post on Industry Analysis by Survey, James McGovern asks for a blog entry on other low questions analyst firms ask.

"Low questions" may be an inevitable consequence of the way much so-called industry analysis is funded. What I really want is to find a viable business model in which analysts can ask the "high questions" they should be asking.

Software industry analysis is basically a two-sided market. Analysts provide value (of different kinds) to the software vendors and to the software users. Some of this value is funded by the vendors, for example by sponsorship, commissioning white papers, keynote presentations and other consultancy work. Some of this value is funded by the software users, for example by purchasing reports and training, subscribing to materials, and consultancy work again.

Analysts also receive value from both sides of the market. They get detailed briefings from vendors, and detailed case studies from users. Analysts under tight deadlines may sometimes be tempted to use this kind of material without thorough critical evaluation; after all, such sources of easy material might dry up if the analysts were too critical. As I said in my post on Industry Analyst Coverage, vendors can influence analysts not just by giving them money but also by doing their work for them. Users don't have the same commercial interest, but they typically block publication of wart-and-all case studies.

Software users sometimes seem to want to have things both ways. On the one hand, they want a high level of quality and independence, and complain when industry analysts fail to cover the things they want covered. But they often aren't willing to provide sufficient funding for this to happen.

Two-sided markets always introduce a level of complexity that is not present in single-sided markets. Like a double pendulum.

Last month I asked about A Value Proposition for Enterprise Architecture. So here's a similar question: what exactly is the value that software industry analysts deliver or should deliver, to whom? Given the obvious doubts about the transparency of how some industry analyst firms operate, is there something that doesn't quite add up in the current business model? Is it possible to formulate a transparent and viable business model for rigorous industry analysis?

Industry Analysis by Survey

@pgiblett @chrisdpotts @seabird20 @

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Following a recent poll of 900 CIOs, Gartner concludes "IT Spending Outlook Still Uncertain". Peter B. Giblett adds "... not necessarily recession related".

Chris Potts comments: "CIOs need to actively resist being cast as primarily interested in IT spending" and adds a hint to CIOs: "If a research organisation asks you how much your company is spending on IT, ask 'why does that matter?'". Chris Bird suggests that a more interesting question would be "What value are you delivering?". Chris Potts then adds a further question: "Which corporate strategy are you leading?"

Excellent questions Chris-and-Chris, but we know that surveys like these generally restrict themselves to asking numerical and multiple-choice questions, because the answers can then be "analysed" using simple Excel. As ChrisB points out, most of the hard numbers (?!) analysis is around purchasing.

The question "Why does that matter?" prompts the question "To whom does that matter?" So who cares about IT spending? Why would a CIO care what percentage of her peers are spending what amount on a given buzzword? Safety in numbers?

Perhaps, as ChrisB suggests, the people most interested in quantifying IT spend are the vendors and investors. But they can't learn much from an unqualified total figure. What they really need is a detailed breakdown, based on a consistent method of cost accounting, and they are not going to get that from surveys like these.

The problem is not just lack of detail, but lack of reliability. As ChrisB points out, people don't always tell the truth. Some CIOs may deliberately distort their answers, while others may simply guess the numbers in order to get the researcher off their backs.

In my opinion, then, the correct retort to "how much do you spend?" is "what meaningful conclusions can you possibly draw from whatever number I give you?"

Industry Analyst Coverage

@mcgoverntheory (James McGovern) complains about the completeness, balance and objectivity of industry analyst coverage. He believes that certain areas are neglected (security, open source), and attributes this to a commercial bias.

• How important is it for industry analysts to include security analysis in their SaaS research?
• Does non-commercial open source have a fighting chance to be mentioned by industry analysts to their customers? How can customers understand analyst transparency when it comes to coverage of non-commercial open source?

James has always been particularly exercised about the fact that OWASP lacks coverage. When he raised this issue with me last year, I responded by posting some questions on the OWASP wiki and the OWASP Linked-In group, as well as several posts on this blog. I'm still waiting for answers.

If there is something in the product offering from any of the large vendors that I don't understand, I can contact one of my analyst relations "minders" and get a reasonably quick answer. If it's a small vendor, I can usually get an answer straight from the CTO. In contrast, my questions to OWASP go into a black hole. One person even suggested that if I wanted to know something about OWASP I needed to start a project. No thanks. (And, to answer Jim's comment below, I don't want to join a mailing list either.)

Industry analysts simply cannot invest that amount of time in chasing non-existent information. If OWASP wishes to be taken seriously by industry analysts, then it needs to put some energy into briefing industry analysts properly, instead of expecting us to root around the OWASP website and complaining when we don't.

Large vendors may sometimes try to influence industry analysts by commissioning work, and many analysts declare this when they deem it relevant. (I think that's what James means by transparency.) But a much more subtle influence can be achieved simply by providing better quality information and making our lives easier.

Layered Architecture of Technology Adoption

@colin_jack asked whether companies ever really change, ignoring situations where there is a big change of staff (one group leaves, another group joins). People seem to want to slip back into their old way of working within weeks or months. Thinking particularly of the fast big bang changes companies go for. Agile, SOA, etc.

Companies do often change their nature as they get larger and older, but this is a slow process. Managed organization change involves several loosely-coupled streams of activity, which operate on different timetables. Installing new software, sending everyone on a training course, renegotiating project charters and external service contracts, building experience and confidence in new practices - these things all happen at different speeds.

A key principle of evolutionary change is that the slow-moving layers generally dominate the faster-moving layers. If your organization wishes to adopt "agile" or "service-orientation" or anything like that, this requires attention to the slow-moving layers as well.

When I was working with CASE tools in the late 1980s, I and a few colleagues constructed an adoption roadmap to help with planning technology adoption. This roadmap was designed in layers or streams, not just to aid with separation of concerns, but also to manage the different characteristic pace of change in each stream. This is architectural thinking applied to organizational change. And nearly twenty years layer, exactly the same principles were used by the CBDI Forum in constructing a roadmap for SOA adoption.

Factoring in Barriers to Entry

@toddbiske and @djbressler make some interesting points about the adoption of software tools and platforms (Factoring in Barriers to Entry). Todd's specific example is applying BPM and BPMN tools to support EA processes, but his remarks would apply in many other contexts.

Todd's basic argument is that adoption is more important than sophistication. Better to get people started with simple tools and platforms - for example Visio and Sharepoint - than do anything that requires the IT department to get its hands dirty. (In an earlier post, Todd identified the IT department as one of the Barriers to SOA Adoption.)

But I don't think of adoption as a simple binary event (from "unadopted" to "adopted") but as a curve (from shallow occasional use to sophisticated and seamless integration into working practice). And although that's not how Todd is using the word "adoption", I think his argument is consistent with a richer notion of adoption. For example, he acknowledges a concern that "low barrier to entry eventually become a boat anchor".

If a vendor boasts thousands of users, and then I discover this merely means installing the trial version of the software and playing with it once, then I'm not very impressed. If a vendor has a dozen customers at the top of the curve, that's much more impressive than a thousand at the bottom of the curve.

From this point of view, lowering the barriers to entry is only half the story. What I'm interested in is the shape of the whole adoption curve, which enables people to find an appropriate level of adoption and not get stuck on the nursery slopes. That's where I think software like Visio and Sharepoint falls down - they may be easy to get started, but they can get hairy if you want to do anything more interesting.

Technologies for the Intelligent Business

#orgintelligence

A number of vendors have started to introduce their own terms for different aspects of organizational intelligence. In the past week or so, I've picked up the following terms.

• Collaboration Networks (Cisco, via Padmasree Warrior)

• Continuous Intelligence (Aleri + Coral8 via Brenda Michelson)

• Smart SOA (IBM concept that pulls together SOA, BPM, Collaboration + business architecture, via Neil Ward-Dutton)

As far as I can see, none of these concepts covers all aspects of Organizational Intelligence, but I need to do a more detailed mapping.

Any other vendor or independent concepts I should look at?

Technologies for Organizational Intelligence

View more presentations from Richard Veryard.

Reflections On Twittering at The Open Group

#ogadc

Using Twitter at The Open Group conference in London this week was a new experience for me, so I thought I'd reflect on it here.

Firstly the mechanics. There was free wifi in the venue; however, many people had difficulty connecting on the first day, and I used my pay-as-you-go dongle instead. Someone proposed a hashtag #ogadc and nearly everyone used that, even though the correct abbreviation for the conference should have been #ogapc.

A number of people including myself started to post 140 character tweets during the sessions. Highlighting key sentences, summarizing or commenting. It was like we were all taking notes into the same notebook. The conference organizers put a large Twitter display screen in the coffee area, so people could read the Tweets from the previous session.

You can see the results here. http://search.twitter.com/search?q=#ogadc

Some people said they found it distracting. For myself, I found that it required a more concentrated listening to the speaker, in order to capture the important points into 140 character Tweets. (Some people continue a single thought over multiple Tweets, but I think that's cheating.)

It also led to new conversations, as Twitter conversations during the sessions developed into face-to-face conversations during the breaks. Sometimes I found I was sitting next to a fellow Twitterer, and could see my Tweets appearing on his screen and vice versa. Thus I made a lot of new friends.

People also posted links to photos as well as video from the evening dinner. I've experienced that at previous conferences via blogging and Technorati and hashtags on Flickr, but Twitter seems to be more effective platform for this kind of thing.

What about people who were not present at the conference? In the recent past, I have picked up interesting Tweets from conferences, so I hoped my followers would be somewhere between tolerant and interested in the unusually high volume of my Tweets. (I probably lost some followers, but I gained some as well. Swings and roundabouts won't break my bones as the saying goes.) Some friends who were not physically present were engaged enough to post Tweets into the conference stream - asking questions or making further comments - and I hope to see more of that kind of virtual participation.