Assessing technology: life after MQs and Waves
Earlier in January, BPM consultant-cum-analyst
Sandy Kemsley made
some interesting points about how the big analyst firms "parcel up" their analyses of technology areas and vendors. Her catalyst was an observation on the way that Gartner and Forrester each segment the BPM technology space.
BPM isn't unique, but it is challenging as a segment for the big analysts, because there are so many viable vendors offering interesting technologies that customers should know about. So - what to do?
Forrester has taken a "divide and conquer" approach, splitting the segment up into four sub-segments: human-centric BPMS (Java), human-centric (Microsoft), integration-centric and document-centric. If a vendor offers technologies which fit multiple of those sub-segments, Forrester covers them in each segment - each with its own Wave.
As Sandy points out, the challenge of Forrester's approach for the customer is that real-world scenarios don't segment themselves according to Forrester's criteria. Most companies have both Java and Microsoft platforms in place, and need to work with both. In most large companies, processes often have human-centric elements, integration-centric elements and (yes) document-centric elements. The customer has to do a fair bit of work to find out what's going to suit them best.
Gartner, on the other hand, produces just one Magic Quadrant for BPM technology - but by necessity (I imagine to do with usability rather than analyst resources - but this is pure speculation, I don't have any "Gartner insiders" to help me with this) it has scoped a number of what I would say are important vendors out of its analysis. No Microsoft, K2, Intalio, Vitria, OpenText. This is puzzling (to me at least). By representing the whole of the BPM technology space with one logical model, the result is a rather "vanilla" perspective.
This is hardly news of course. So why am I so exercised by it?
The answer is that we think there's a better way to provide comparative vendor analysis to customers.
A key problem underlying both Forrester's and Gartner's approaches is that in order to work within the constraints of their analysis and publishing infrastructure and processes, they're having to make quite a few assumptions about what kind of technologies and companies customers are interested in, and why. The hope, presumably, is that any mismatch between customer expectations and the analyst firms' delivery methods will be met through one-on-one consultation with analysts, who will interpret their own papers on the phone, (hopefully) in the context of their customers' needs. If a you don't have an opportunity for one-to-one consultation, then... it's up to you to try and figure it all out.
Wouldn't it be better if there was an approach that made as few up-front assumptions as possible, but instead provided an online, hosted interactive environment, accessing data from one broad vendor and technology database, where customers could shape analysis and recommendations themselves by providing information about what was important to them and what wasn't?
Such an environment would take customer "preferences" and use them to tune the rankings that were presented. Ideally, preferences wouldn't just be focused on elements of functionality, but also on attributes of vendors themselves (for example - do you only want to buy from big companies, or companies with offices in your geography?), technology dependencies (for example - do you only want to buy from companies who can run their software on Linux or support a certain standard?). Customers wouldn't have to provide such "preferences" - but the more information they provided about their constraints and interests, the more relevant the analysis would be.
Does that sound like too much to ask?
We don't think so. We think customers of industry analyst firms often have to do too much work in order to get relevant advice. So we're using approach described above for new MWD analyses of BPM technology offerings and Enterprise Collaboration technology offerings. We're launching new interactive, online comparison and ranking tools for these two areas as part of two new advisory services which will launch in the coming months.
Oh, and if this sounds interesting, don't worry that you'll have to pay an extortionate amount of money to get access to these tools. We'll be offering free trials to enterprise IT departments :-)
Watch this space.
Labels: BPM, collaboration, forrester, gartner, MWD
