IT advisory ideas & more...
Tony Greenberg wrote a recent blog post (on tonygreenberg.com) which pertains to IT trends; when reading it I wondered if it had any implications for the Advisory industry…. Readers should note that Tony is an ‘outsourcing’ advocate; I’ll summarize his article with my comments in brackets, and then ask a question: We need to sharpen our instincts and stop trusting IT...
read more
The New York Times on 1/25/2011 printed a photograph of a gentleman looking down at a chessboard, with an interesting subtitle: Pattern recognition is what sets experts apart from novices. The article points out that “when subjects were shown a chess diagram, the novices looked directly at the pieces to recognize them, while the experts looked on the middle of the boards and took...
read more
A recent question posed to fifteen CIOs (or equivalent) regarding value received from Advisory deliverables, resulted in the answers below (Gartner was not mentioned by me, but virtually all of these were Gartner clients) The question: How do you measure the value you obtain from your current IT advisory service subscriptions? The answers: We don’t measure it. Not sure we’re getting...
read more
Will advisory services recover from current sluggish levels? Whether sold commercially, or distributed internally, knowledge produced by for-profit companies (as compared to information available for free on the web) will continue to be under strong pressures to be priced, because knowledge costs money to produce. In fact, we are now witnessing a rationalization of pricing levels in the...
read more
Mike Simmons of IDG, editor of ComputerWorld UK, recently referred to my post, called: a Gartner publication, with G.Gartner’s comments. (find it at http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/editors-blog/2010/07/gideon-gartner-takes-a-swipe-at-the-analyst-group-he-founded/index.htm) You’ll find this (currently) on the front page of my blog (otherwise, search on “The Advisory...
read more
By Barbara French and Gideon Gartner (@bfr3nch, www.barbarafrench.net, @gideongartner,gideongartner.com) In the first part of this post, we challenged an urban myth that small analyst firms are threatening the Gartner and Forrester Research business models. We as yet see no compelling evidence. What we do see is many small advisory firms performing vital roles in the IT ecosystem, a few...
read more
G.Gartner’s note: the purpose of this post is to describe Gartner Inc.’s own chronology of its early years, with my comments in brackets [ ], which represent an attempt to help set the record straight. This post is not meant to describe the innovations which resulted in Gartner’s growing from zero to dominating its field within a decade, the 1980s. I’ll switch my...
read more
By Barbara French and Gideon Gartner (@bfr3nch, www.barbarafrench.net, @gideongartner,gideongartner.com) There’s a good deal of speculation on whether the research and advisory business is entering a new phase — one in which small Advisory firms may be thriving at the expense of the large firms. David Hatch summed up this point of view in a forestercomment to “Advisory Industry, a...
read moreThis is part two of a 2-part series. Click here to read Part I. When it was their turn to present, the CEO went through a somewhat plastic presentation, a standard sounding pitch which was undoubtedly used to charge up the people in his numerous offices around the world, and possibly to impress clients as well. There was little value-add, and when he got to the benefits to Gartner which a...
read moreThis is a story presented in two parts… The material below describes the visit of the CEO and officers of a very large company (all of whom will be nameless), when the firm was bidding to acquire our company from Saatchi, despite our resistance. Gartner and 10 other consultancies were put on the auction block by Saatchi & Saatchi in June 1989, and in late October one of the firms...
read moreIn 1989 Ryal Poppa, Chairman of the Board of Storage Technology Corporation, a billion dollar computer peripherals corporation which Poppa had brought out of bankruptcy was visiting our Gartner analysts to present his marketplace strategies and he asked for an audience with me. I had known Poppa for many years from the early 1970’s when I was on Wall Street and he ran Pertec, another computer...
read moreAs mentioned, Gartner’s and Forrester’s (G&F) pricing policies in tandem suggest that they can live with each other peacefully, not bothered by competition. I can see the IT vendors accepting the increases because they’re hoping to indirectly encourage Advisory’s support of their product values (it would be interesting to know how their AR people are handling this). Is anyone...
read more
Murray Gell-Mann is one of the world’s standout intellectual legends, where he’s known for developing key aspects of the modern theory of quantum physics, but is renowned in many other fields as well. Admitted to Yale at 15, he earned his PhD from MIT at 21; in 1969 he received the Nobel prize (unshared) in Physics. But he has also become an international adviser on the environment,...
read moreThe two largest sell-side firms in our space, Gartner and Forrester (G&F), have been open about their policies of annual 5-7% price increases, plus no client discounts, plus other similar policies, perhaps assuming that the economy will thrive and that clients will not care about 5% here and there. This new policy hints at the possibility that G&F live with each other peacefully, and are...
read moreSome day the Advisory Industry may look different than today, and an example of what’s possible may be the manner in which vendor and user clients compensate their Advisory providers. It seems worthwhile for segments of our industry to study this alternative compensation model, as it has been implemented successfully in the Wall Street Research space over many decades, being both useful...
read moreThe area of conferences was one which I continued to get deeply involved with throughout my Gartner career. I’ll recount one example of many which does not address the design of conference/expositions, but the maximization of potential usefulness of such events to the clients of Advisories. CeBIT was and is the world’s largest computer exposition, and I decided that we should not only...
read moreWhat follows are a couple of paragraphs from a much longer and more informative post: Gartner Innovation During Its Formative Years. Gartner Group’s Business Model: Innovation During its Formative Years During the 1960′s at IBM and 1970′s on Wall Street, I was a subscriber or reader of research from several firms which were predecessors to the current Advisory Industry. The...
read more
A brief sideshow: After the intimate family party celebrating my 75th birthday, I posted a description of some of my kid’s gifts on my “Gideon Gartner” blog category. Two items from that blog click here to access the Gideon Gartner category, which have to do with Gartner Group “culture”, are repeated here with minor changes. Around 1986, my older daughter Sabrina...
read moreI’m sometimes asked if any competitor of Gartner could unseat it as the leading Advisory. I think not. But, could a competitor penetrate it? Allow me to share with you accurate data from my Giga experience, based upon the huge and detailed spreadsheet by month which I recently found in a closet, dating back to 10/1/2000! As you likely know, I founded Giga in late 1994 (I left Gartner in...
read more
35th Anniversary of Gartner Inc.'s Founding: Gartner Inc. (originally called Gartner Group) was born on April 1, 1979, together with a ... [read more]
Oh My Darling Clementine: My three year-old grand-daughter Clementine is very smart. While she's never taken any piano lessons ... [read more]
Social Networking May Be Bad for Your Health: What might have once been called 'intellectual networking' seems to have been displaced by today's ... [read more]
Genius Economist Suggests Solution to Housing Problem: John Geanakoplos is James Tobin professor of economics at Yale University and one of the founders of Ellington Capital Management, ... [read more]
Which Executive Education School Is Tops?: Interestingly, executive education rankings by various publications produce results which seem all over the map. In fact, the ... [read more]