Freeform Alliances in Context

A couple of partnerships between Freeform Dynamics and other independent analyst firms have been announced recently, specifically with MWD and RedMonk. The basic idea is to bring together our primary research approach and capability with the specific domain expertise of the partners concerned. In practical terms, this means sharing intelligence and delivering joint services that combine elements of larger scale research with in-depth consulting and advice.

To those of us involved in the partnerships, and, indeed, to the vendor clients we have spoken with, the rationale for collaborating is fairly obvious and compelling (otherwise we wouldn’t be doing it). A friendly “challenge” from analyst watcher Duncan Chapple, however, suggests the logic may not be that clear to everyone. Duncan writes:

"Despite its undoubted strengths [ref the Freeform Dynamics approach], we struggle to see how this form of research - which is essentially retrospective and quantitative - can fit the research methods of MWD, which is highly domain-specific, qualitative and focussed on generalising the most advanced and strongest approaches to aligning IT, rather than divining the mainstream."

Duncan followed up with a separate email alerting us to his analysis and inviting us to reply. I therefore thought I would take the opportunity to present some of the highlights of our own analysis of the industry analyst community, specifically of the smaller independent analyst space. This is based on an exercise we went through before setting up the new company, which directly led to us designing Freeform Dynamics with partnering in mind from the outset. It is a general discussion rather than a specific response to Duncan’s question, but deals with the latter towards the end.

[NB: The views expressed here are from Freeform Dynamics and do not necessarily represent the views of our partners. Unless explicitly stated, comments made should not be regarded as referring to any particular analysts or analyst firms]

DISCUSSION

Smaller analyst firms are, well, small. That means they have limited resource, which in turn means they cannot be everywhere and do everything that larger analyst firms do. They cannot cover the whole industry in depth and do not have the luxury of harvesting intelligence from extensive end user consulting, which typically ties people up for far too long to be sustainable in a small firm.

Small analyst firms therefore have to make choices about how they spend their time, and most choose to focus their efforts on understanding and working with some part of the supplier community. They engage as analysts to gather information for their research and provide consulting and marketing support services back in the other direction, which is typically how they make their money.

An unavoidable consequence of this is that some firms end up aligned with a small number of big vendors. This is probably not by design, and often, in fact, reflects the pragmatics of small company economics. If a big vendor takes an interest in you and keeps giving you business, it is easy to get sucked into their world.

The more disciplined firms tend to focus on specific areas, defined by either technology or business problem, covering them in a vendor independent way and accumulating knowledge in relation to many different products and suppliers. This allows them to talk authoritatively on mobility, SOA, compliance architectures, or whatever, and develop ideas that can be genuinely thought leading. The better firms also continually enhance their expertise and insights by engaging in broader industry discussions with vendors, academics and industry special interest groups, typically through blogs, events, etc. The Freeform Partners that have been formally announced, MWD and RedMonk, both operate in this way and their people are regarded as experts by the experts.

But generating all this knowledge and insight into the way ideas and technologies are emerging and developing is only part of the story, and we must not lose sight of why analysts are there in the first place. This is something Jon Collins and I have discussed continously over the past few years. The fact is that emerging ideas and technologies only matter if people out there in the real world of the business/public sector mainstream understand them and see the relevance of them. This requires effective communication and to communicate effectively with anyone, you have to tune into their wavelength or help them tune into yours.

And herein lies a potential problem, If you spend a lot of time as an analyst thinking about how the industry will look in 3 years, 5 years or 10 years time, or get too wrapped up in one specific idea or concept, you can so easily come across to folks in the mainstream “here and now” as talking about a different world that is separate to theirs. They then fail to understand the relevance of the analysis or advice, or simply ignore it as a bunch of theoretical idealism.

In order to avoid this problem, which occurs more often than many analysts would like to acknowledge, smaller analyst firms need to do two things. Firstly, they need to make sure they are producing material (reports, articles, etc) for people in the mainstream, rather than for industry insiders or vendors they are trying to impress. Secondly, they need to build a bridge between the ideas they are trying to communicate and the perceptions, priorities and concerns that already exist in peoples’ minds out there – ordinary IT and Business professionals.

So we finally come to answering Duncan’s question about why thought leading domain specialists like MWD and RedMonk might want to partner with a primary research specialist like Freeform Dynamics. We provide intelligence from the mainstream which significantly enhances the ability to tune into the minds of the people we are all trying to reach. The end result is that ideas the experts consider to be worthwhile can be presented in a more pragmatic, empathetic and meaningful manner. Those ideas are then more likely to resonate and persist, which is in the interests of both buyers/users and the suppliers who want to do business with them.

I guess to finish off this essay, we should also remember that vendors and analysts do not have a monopoly on the whole advice and guidance thing. There is some pretty cutting edge thinking going on out there in end user land, often by people simply getting on with their job. Most of these people would never consider blogging about their experiences and ideas or otherwise communicating them to the wider world. Through our particular form of research, which to be clear is about investigating ideas, perceptions and experiences, we can harvest at least some of this goodness, which provides another set of input to help people move forward effectively and efficiently.