Let’s deal with direct influence first. You directly influence everyone you do business with. If an analyst spends all the time working for vendors then they have an influence primarily on vendors.

Here’s what they might do for their vendor customers:

Technical due diligence, provide product development consultancy, do benchmarks, do surveys, do communications testing, review marketing collateral, write sponsored white papers and sit on the advisory board providing advice on anything and everything.

If that’s their whole life, then you might want to hire them – if they’re very good at any of these things – but you have no great incentive to make sure they’re up-to-date on your technology. You don’t need to target them in the hope that they will pass your message on. The people they’re most likely to explain it to are your allies or your competitors.

IT User Consultancy

If an analyst spends any time working for IT users then they may be passing your message in some way to potential customers. They might be doing one of two things for such customers:

1. General IT consultancy
2. Product selection consultancy

If my experience is anything to go by, general IT consultancy will most likely involve strategic advice on major projects such as establishing a web strategy, adopting SOA, implementing identity management, upgrading a development environment, building a data warehouse and so on. Such projects usually involve briefing the customer on products, but only as part of the activity. The reason an analyst has been hired is because he or she will know a lot more about different options because they know an awful lot more about different products than your typical consultant. Analysts also get retained by companies so that they can provide advice of this kind on a regular basis.

It can be a breath of fresh air for the customer because the typical analyst is not forever trying to introduce an army of consultants into their company. As a consultant, an analyst may also try to provide best practice advice. There is a need for it.

In the mid-1990s, there was a general collapse in sensible IT practices. It was caused by the fact that people who had no experience of IT projects found themselves in control of major projects with major budgets. Major project failures followed, accompanied by a good deal of blamestorming. I saw this happen with data warehouse projects (and other major BI projects), knowledge management projects and ecommerce projects, and it’s happening right now in BPM projects. There is a general lack of big project experience and consequently the simplest of mistakes are made. The most common are:

1. Not doing a feasibility study.
2. Not defining measurable project goals.
3. Not establishing project scope and bolting it down.

Normally I run into such errors after the fact, when I’m called in to do a project audit after a project has jumped off the rails. There’s been an explosion of interest in IT governance because of this.

Product Selection

What IT vendors fear most is that an IT analyst will be called in to provide product selection consultancy and will mention their product unfavorably or, just as bad, not mention it at all. It’s a sensible fear, but the reality of product selection exercises that I’ve been involved in, is that I have never had much influence over which product was selected. All I influence as an analyst is:

• Which products get on the selection short-list.
• How the evaluation is carried out.

The analyst is hired primarily to ensure that the selection process is coherent and to provide information to the process as it proceeds. The short list normally includes the dominant vendor if there is one, plus two other vendors whose products most closely match the requirements. Even if the dominant vendor’s product is a poor fit, they get onto the shortlist so that no-one can say; “You mean you didn’t consider Oracle? Are you crazy?”

In many cases, which product is selected doesn’t matter too much as long as it “can do what it claims to do”. Bad product selection occurs when some salesman makes unjustified claims:

IT user: “Can it scale to 10,000 users?”

Salesman: “Hey, can jumbo jets fly?”

Be warned. That’s an example from real life – and as it happens, that particular jumbo jet couldn’t fly. The analyst is there to stop such travesties.

Product selection exercises are becoming rarer than they used to be, because IT professionalism is in decline. I recently got involved in a survey of IT user sites, all of which were getting involved in large projects with very significant IT spends. Of 11 sites that I talked to, not a single one actually did a product selection exercise or (as the survey revealed) had a full knowledge of the range of options available to them.

I wasn’t surprised. That’s why IT governance has become such a prominent issue.

Note: This posting is one in a series of postings that deals with the topic of dealing with analysts. Click here for links to other postings in the series.