ITasITis

I’m backlogging again. So here are a few things you might want to check out, without my usual go-behind-the-news amplification.

Following up my post on Apple’s iPhone stats, here’s George Colony, CEO of Forrester Research, on why the BlackBerry might give way to the iPhone in the corporate environment. Yes I know this is an old post: but I only tagged it in Google Sharing when I found it, and it’s worth a read.

• Goodbye BlackBerry: The Counterintuitive CEO, 30 June 2009

Here’s a note from Amazon Web Services, where Jeff Barr (who I met at Barcamp Brighton last year) relays a neat case study about a particular use of the AWS SimpleDB – and reminds readers that you can use it for free

• SecondTeacher – Scalable Math Homework Help in the Cloud, AWS blog, 6 Oct 2009

And here’s Google, trumpeting their own green credentials with a lot of physical infrastructure which has, presumably, been put in place since I visited the campus in 2005 and 2006. They can do it at Mountain View; California has sunshine!

• A green tour of the Google campus, Official Google Blog, 15 Oct 2009

And going back a bit, here’s a link to some  notes and a deeper briefing about the differences between the various browsers. Apparently among an admittedly small sample, many more people knew which car they drive than which browser they use, despite spending far more time surfing than driving. Don’t forget, though, that Google has an interest in this one (called Chrome).

• What is a browser? Official Google Blog, 6 Oct 2009

And for those of us who use the connected Web: LinkedIn has reached a milestone: 50 million users. That’s a fair growth rate since I was there, crammed into a startup meeting room with twenty colleagues, three LinkedIn guys, and the coke machine, in 2005.

• LinkedIn: 50 million professionals worldwide, LinkedIn Blog, 14 Oct 2009

I think that’s enough to be going on with! I’m beginning to develop a profile in Google Share, so you’ll see more there and less in del.icio.us from now on. Save this link:

• ITasITis in Google Share

I absolutely love this version of the Hype Cycle which Euan Semple found from Geek & Poke:

Hype Cycle 2.0

The thing is, it’s a fair representation of it. Rather like the version of the Laws of Thermodynamics as a restatement of Murphy’s Law, which goes:
1 – you can’t win
2 – you can only break even at absolute zero
3 – you can never reach absolute zero

Doesn’t apply in enterprise IT, though, where absolute zero is sometimes quite common!

Gartner Hype Cycle Version 2.0, The Obvious, 26 Aug 2009

I’m advertising a significant upgrade to the InformationSpan index of Gartner’s blogs. It’s been in my mind for some time to revisit this, update the data, and add an alternative index based on the analysts’ coverage areas.

To remind you: the rationale for this page existing at all is that analysts’ blogs can be a great way to access their most recent thinking and expertise, without a subscription. They don’t have the imprimatur of the official reports, but most of us can live with that!

Almost 50 of Gartner’s analysts now maintain personal blogs. But Gartner’s Blog Network page only lists the analysts’ names – and, at that, in the order of their most recent postings. Most users, I suspect, want to know which analyst to follow for particular coverage. And: did you know that Gartner also has a handful of blogs with particular names? I call these titled blogs and I’ve added an index to these too – including an important blog that doesn’t have a link on Gartner’s page (Mastering the Hype Cycle, reviewed here on 14 Oct 2008).

So: go to informationspan.com. Click the link in the header to get to the index of analyst blogs. Under the Gartner page, there are now three options.

1 – When you first open the page it displays a new index to the handful of Gartner’s titled blogs which appear still to be active, and links to switch to the other options.

2 – The existing list of personal blogs in order of the analysts’ names has been updated and now shows all the areas each analyst covers, to give you some guidance on content

3 – I’ve added a brand new listing by coverage area, listing the analysts who blog in each section of Gartner’s research classification

So you can find the right blog and link to it, to the analyst’s bio, and to the description of the area of research they work in – whether it’s a technology segment or an industry vertical.

Try it out at informationspan.com

Here in the snowy UK I was trying to check out the weather for the Derby area and found a broken link on the local Derby page of the BBC website. Not their fault; Google had delivered a page which is clearly marked “we’re no longer updating this page”. But I didn’t notice straight away, so I clicked the link and it failed.

But they have a really smart idea. The Error 404 page that came up included a site search box, so right there I could make another attempt to find what I wanted. And I did.

Great idea, BBC!

Outside my normal field of comment: but, amid the furore about the BBC deciding not to screen the appeal for disaster relief in Gaza, did you notice how far the BBC News went to make up for the deficiency?

Their news report went out with a backdrop of the poster, there was at least one (though extremely short) extract from the film, and the DEC website address was included in the backdrop towards the end of the report.

Well done BBC News! Disaster relief whether earthquake or warzone doesn’t take sides. If you missed it, visit http://www.dec.org.uk/.

If you’re tracking this blog, you’ll notice the sudden arrival of a fistful of old posts from September last year to mid February. In February I moved ITasITis from LiveJournal to WordPress, primarily because WordPress shows me usage statistics and LiveJournal doesn’t. But I left the older postings on LJ for the time being.

It’s these old postings from LJ that I’ve just moved over, so I can close down the LJ account. You may see them crop up again as I edit them to bring the tagging into line. They might even be worth reading!

Regards,
TOny

A note in Gartner’s latest mailing alerted me to the fact that Iona Technologies, a great Irish success story, is coming to the end of its independent existence. It’s being acquired by Progress Software.

Why do I call Iona a great success? For me it’s always been an example, particularly to the Eurosceptic UK, of how to get the best out of Europe. From the Irish Republic’s wholehearted participation in Europe, researchers at Trinity College Dublin (Chris Horn, Annrai O’Toole and others) used the Esprit and Framework programmes to support development of innovative middleware. Iona was spun off in the 1990s, became an international player, and acquired a base in the US, but remained an Irish company and the acquisition will proceed under Irish law.

Its principals took technology leadership to the Object Management Group, contributing to OMG architectures and basing products on them. The company is active in a range of Open Source initiatives. They shared their insights widely through collaborative research and speaking engagements. Although Iona as a company will be judged to have stayed a leader in the second division – it never became an Oracle or BEA – its influence has been disproportionately huge.

We wish Iona well for the future.

Links:
• Progress Software Corporation to Acquire IONA Technologies Progress/Iona press release 25 Jun 2008
• Iona Technologies company website
• Progress Software company website
• Iona Technologies (Wikipedia)
• Progress Acquires Iona to Strengthen Presence in AIM Market from Gartner Flash, 3 July 2008, fully accessible to Gartner clients only

There’s a discussion going on over “what is an analyst”, started by sagecircle and picked up in various places.

A great dal of what’s discussed is for IT vendors’ analyst relations professionals, rather than users. I’ve a different perspective because I’ve come out of a decade or so managing analyst services for a major enterprise IT function. So, rather than comment in the existing threads, I’ll spawn a slightly different one here and link back.

I’ve encountered a variety of attitudes among colleagues, ranging from those who see the output as commodity research papers to those – myself included – who looked for a longer term strategic relationship. We talk about research services, about information providers, about advisory services as well as about analysts. What enterprises want is insight – into a marketplace, into an IT-business issue, into a strategic question, into a technology future. So I talk about insight services.

From the enterprise perspective (so this isn’t relevant for vendor-oriented services), what does the client want? That’s another way of saying, how did I position the service I was managing?

Of course, you want eyes and ears in the technology marketplace. You want people who have the spread you can’t have, the time to develop the knowledge, and the ability to draw conclusions. You want people who know the connection between IT and business. That’s research and analysis, in the sense the threads have discussed it.

But you want something more. All the major insight services – Forrester, Gartner, IDC, whoever – will want to develop a closer relationship. The more understanding they have of your business, the more they can go beyond their research base (the written documents, and the work that went into them) and provide specific, tailored advice that is relevant to your own enterprise – not just your type of business, or your industry sector at large.

For me, the thing that’s been missed in the discussion about what defines an analyst is precisely this ability to go beyond the research and provide insight that makes the data, the analysis actionable in the specific context. That’s true whether you are speaking of a service company as a whole, of an individual analyst within one of those companies, or of a one person outfit. That’s what makes an insight service, rather than just an analyst.

Links:

• What is the definition of “analyst”? sagecircle, 1 May 2008
• Link to the above in Tekrati Keeping Tabs, which also links to the Wikipedia definition
and all the links in those posts.