There’s a opportunity facing analysts. It arises from a gap between what analysts offer and what their clients are looking for. Analyst firms traditionally use analytical skills which, by focussing research through structured and sequential methods, tend to blinker and confine their analysis. In today’s difficult market, businesses often need creative solutions. Both vendors and users of high technology need to develop creative solutions. Creativity is a word that sometimes sounds a little strange in a technology setting. Many businesspeople think of brainstorming as the sum total of creativity’s place in the workplace. In fact, many business people need to ‘de-tox’ their process because structured and analytic thinking works better for stable, late-majority, processes but not for organisations that are looking for radically new ways of developing new solutions, finding ways to transform experiences.
This requires *strategic* creativity, not just a toolbox of tactics. Business people need open minds to develop new approaches. Managers need the motivation and methods for adding value and for solve problems (including those which are not similar to past ones) . Intelligence needs to be used flexibly, rather than by the pattern recognition that analysts excel at. This flexibility requires a combination of both playfulness and maturity to look beyond what we already know.
Analysts often work by looking for incremental changes to meet users’ already-stated needs. They often lack a ‘innovation push’ approach, trying to identify new opportunities, rather than just a ‘demand pull’ approach. Analysts are often poorly equipped to anticipate changes, to speculate or to redesign business processes in a way that focusses on the value derived from customer experience. Analysts focus on hard RoI, rather than the crazy, risky need to imagine.
What can analyst firms do to help clients envision new ways out outperforming already-established best practise and of risking crazy ideas? In particular, this requires an open and interactive method for getting ideas, learning from others and experimenting. That is very different from the uninspiring, unoriginal, conservative, repetition-based, approaches which flow from stable, permanent research processes.
With three weeks until the start on June 20th, registrations for the Analyst Relations Forum are already at 764. Here’s a list of the sessions with hyperlinked individual registration lists. The full details are at thearforum.com. AR in practice: Using data and insights to drive programme success Exploring AR’s role in the wider ecosystem of…
This summer Kea Company will publish three ‘Influencer Quadrant‘ reports to identify the firms with the most profile in industry research. Previously, only clients of Kea Company’s premium service had access to the data, which track the profile of over 400 brands in the research of around 400 research organisations. The Influencer Quadrant service was created…
5. Vendors approach analysts with an undifferentiated message and lack of thought in their vision and strategy. Downside – why should an analyst pay any attention to a boring, me too vendor, especially if the market is crowded and fragmented?
Ovum’s principal analyst for IT services has moved to upstart firm HfS Research. Having already worked at IDC, NelsonHall and Gartner, Dr Tom Reuner (@tom_reuner) gave me this exclusive interview on the analyst industry, and what made him move.
We get the feeling that sales enablement is something that popped up recently in the office of many AR professionals. How is that possible, you might ask yourself. Well, the people that pay your salary are just being informed about what AR does and how it can contribute even more to the company.
Christian Hampel, a researcher from the Psychologische Institut Mainz, and I have a totally new analyst relations strategy. Since February, we have been developing and testing some ideas from social psychology in conversations with industry analysts, AR people and a range of academic researchers.
3 Comments
Back to the future then? I don’t see firms hiring ‘mad professors’ or ex. academics starting their own crystal ball boutique, do you?
Or in other words, is there a new generation of Robin Bloor, Gideon Gartner, Martin Butler, etc -or is there no longer a business model for it because IT is now “normal”?
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As an analyst focused on financial ROI, I can assure you that creativity and ROI are not exclusive. Understanding the ROI of BYOD, mobile applications, social media, visualization applications, and other consumerized technologies can take some creativity. I actually find that end users tend to be flexible and creative (because they have to be) while vendor AR tends to be very rigid. That makes it a challenge to translate end user inquiries to AR because it really is speaking two different languages. AR wants to hear about pure deal influence rather than how they can provide new offerings that can change their relative positioning.
This isn’t hard and fast; some of our vendor advisory clients do understand the opportunity. But on the whole, the end user advisory clients are far more flexible.
businesses often need creative solutions. Both vendors and users of high technology need to develop creative solutions. Creativity is a word that sometimes sounds a little strange in a technology setting. Many businesspeople think of brainstorming as the sum total of creativity’s place in the workplace. In fact, many business people need to ‘de-tox’ their process because structured and analytic thinking works better for stable, late-majority, processes but not for organisations that are looking for radically new ways of developing new solutions, finding ways to transform experiences.
Back to the future then? I don’t see firms hiring ‘mad professors’ or ex. academics starting their own crystal ball boutique, do you?
Or in other words, is there a new generation of Robin Bloor, Gideon Gartner, Martin Butler, etc -or is there no longer a business model for it because IT is now “normal”?
As an analyst focused on financial ROI, I can assure you that creativity and ROI are not exclusive. Understanding the ROI of BYOD, mobile applications, social media, visualization applications, and other consumerized technologies can take some creativity. I actually find that end users tend to be flexible and creative (because they have to be) while vendor AR tends to be very rigid. That makes it a challenge to translate end user inquiries to AR because it really is speaking two different languages. AR wants to hear about pure deal influence rather than how they can provide new offerings that can change their relative positioning.
This isn’t hard and fast; some of our vendor advisory clients do understand the opportunity. But on the whole, the end user advisory clients are far more flexible.