Open source approaches to analyst relations

Industry veterans Barbara French and Neil Macehiter are amongst those co-operating in a new wiki that aims to create a guide for enterprises doing business with analysts with ‘open source’ business models (other participants include Jon Collins, Dave Vile, James Governor, myself and others).

It’s an innovative approach and we’re encouraging folk to take part. If it succeeds even partially, then it could make life a lot easier for both analysts and vendors. It could also be a model for groups like the IIAR, DARA and SPAR. I’ve put a button linking to the wiki at the end of this post. At the bottom of the right hand column, you’ll see a feed to carry future updates from the project.

James McGovern almost certainly deserves the credit for this wiki. He has encouraged the development of a wiki space for developing a “user guide” to the open source analysis analyst community (thus, “osaa”). The volunteers on the project will be starting with James’ post on the topic.

Clearly, there are some vested interests who might pose material obstacles to the success of their project. AR advisors might take a number of approaches towards it, especially since many attempt to reduce the tasks of analyst relations to just one or two firms. Furthermore, the influence of open source analysts is itself harder to track than that of their colleagues (we have already had a discussion about definitions, which it itself interesting). However, the area of open source and alternative analysts must the topic that is most open to discussion and collaboration using open sourse, creative commons, tools like this wiki.

P.S. Please join Neil Ward-Dutton and I on February 15 for a free conference call to discuss Open Source analysis.