Pattern Finder

I'm Now Blogging at the Gartner Blog Network

Discerning readers will have noticed that I haven't been blogging much recently. (Even my mother and teenage daughter commented on it).

That's due to a combination of (1) me being busy and (2) Gartner policy. Gartner analysts blog on IT issues at the Gartner Blog Network, not in personal blogs. Until today, I didn't have a logon to the Gartner Blog Network. Now I do. So follow my postings at http://blogs.gartner.com/guy-creese/.

Analyst Trick #2: Look Back at History

A History major in college, I've always tried to gain insight into the future by looking back at the past. In my role as an industry analyst, that predilection is extremely useful.

Let's face it--trying to predict what will happen in the future is a task fraught with danger, and industry analysts are not always good at it. A decade ago, back when I was working on the vendor side, I remember amusing myself by reading three-year-old Forrester Research reports and seeing how far off their predictions were.

This isn't to say I haven't committed my own howlers. When I wrote the first analyst report on web analytics back in mid-2000, I forecast that the market would have revenues of $425 million in 2000 (up from $141 million in 1999) and enjoy robust growth for years to come. The $425 million number was actually pretty accurate--however, I didn't foresee the impact of the dot.com bust, which caused revenues to remain stagnant for the next several years. The web analytics market certainly didn't hit my predicted mark of $4 billion in 2004. So that mistake has turned into a history lesson for me: take into account outlier scenarios.

I've worked in high tech long enough that it's easy for me to see that new technologies are often old architectures wrapped in a new vocabulary.  For example, Ajax is another name for client/server on the web. In fact, client/server itself was a repackaging of an architecture used by the Wang VS minicomputer back in the 1980's, when every VS terminal contained a Z80 chip so that graphics could be performed on the terminal without sending an interrupt back to the central CPU after every keystroke. (In contrast, every terminal keystroke went back to the DEC VAX, which is why Wang always beat DEC in high-volume word processing applications.)

Analyst Trick #1: Look for Disgruntled Users

This is the first in a series of posts on "analyst tricks"--heuristics and behaviors that I've picked up over the years that help me analyze technology and markets.

Whenever I hear an end user toss terms into the conversation such as, "obstructionist," "bunch of bozos," and "hard to use," my ears perk up. There's an opportunity for a technological revolution lurking somewhere here.

Major technological revolutions have taken place because they allow users to be significantly more productive. The invention of the word processor meant that secretaries didn't have to retype an entire letter when they got a sentence wrong; spreadsheets meant that financial analysts didn't have to manually add up numbers. These two technologies led to huge advances in productivity and helped explain their popularity. (When I worked at Wang Laboratories, there were a number of stories of secretaries--once they had seen a demo of the Wang Word Processor--who refused to type another letter until their boss bought one for them. These devices were not cheap: $20,000 in the late 1970's).

Pretty basic, huh? Such a statement is not a huge revelation. However, a twist on this rule is that technological revolutions take place when a product offers incremental productivity but gives users much more freedom and and a sense of well-being. Put another way, if you're looking only for huge productivity leaps, you'll miss the popularity of products that give visceral joy.

Vendor Oops #4: Not Saying What You Do Upfront

This is sort of "odd but true"--in the course of a briefing, some vendors take forever to explain what they do.

There are three reasons for this:

1. They Go for PR Speak: For example, early on in the briefing the vendor will put up a mission slide that says, "XYZ Corp. leverages Web 2.0 technologies across multiple channels so that companies can deliver the right information to the right people at the right time." In other words, a mission statement full of PR babble. OK, all the buzzwords are there, but what does it really mean? XYZ Corp. could be selling social networking; or an RSS server; or a search engine; or a tagging engine--the list goes on. So the vendor thinks it's clear--but the analyst is going, "Huh?"
2. They're Familiar with What They Do and Figure You Are Too: This vendor assumes what they do is self-evident, and dives into the technology without setting any context: "Two weeks from now we're announcing version 4.2, which adds semantic analysis to the Enterprise Server."(OK, but since I'm unclear on what you do, I don't know whether that's good or bad.)
3. They Get Around to It Half an Hour Into the Presentation: This vendor often starts with a history lesson ("XYZ Corp. was founded in 2007 in Sunnyvale"), moves on to management depth ("200 total years of experience in document management products), talks about customers (attempting to win the prize for the most logos that can be squeezed on a slide), announces the new product features, and eventually gets around to saying, "So that's why we we're so good at entity extraction." (Finally!)

The issue here is the vendor needs to quickly set context for the analyst. This may be the fourth vendor briefing of the day, and things are starting to blend together; the analyst may have been writing a deep dive report on a competing technology and needs a signal of, "And now for something completely different." Saying by slide three, "We're XYZ Corp. and we do this [in plain English]" suffices.

When I worked at Aberdeen Group, Bob Moran and I would keep track of how long it took a vendor to clearly say what they did. After the briefing, we'd close the door, sit down, and grouse, "Well, that took 10 minutes; at least it was better than last week's record holder, which was 18 minutes." I remember in one briefing I couldn't contain myself, and eventually said, "Pardon the interruption, but it's now 25 minutes into the briefing and you still haven't said what you do." Stunned silence from the vendor, and then a hesitant, "Uh, we offer an easy-to-use data mining product for marketing professionals." "Oh, OK. You should have said that up front. I've spent the past 25 minutes trying to figure it out."

It's simple. Say what you do. Up front.

Vendor Oops #3: Not Sending Me the Presentation

Cover via Amazon

I don't get it. Vendors will go to great lengths to brief me on their new product release, and then neglect to send me the presentation after the briefing. It's sort of like the "Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner"--they run for miles, and then refuse to run the last 10 feet to cross the finish line. This happens probably half of the time (yes, I keep stats). The causes are several:

• It's Finished Two Minutes Before the Briefing: Some vendors figure they'll send the deck before the briefing (not a bad idea), but it's never ready beforehand because they're always in tweak mode. And then after the briefing they forget that they didn't send it.
• They're On to the Next Crisis/Analyst Briefing: They finish the briefing, heave a sigh of relief, move on to the next call, and forget to send it.
• Paranoia About NDA Violations: Some vendors don't send a deck because Legal has told them this prevents non-disclosure violations. So the company will go through the slides during a web conference but refuse to send the actual deck. (Uh, apparently Legal has never heard of screen capture software.)  
• Incompetent PR People: During the briefing the PR person swears on a stack of bibles that he or she will send me the deck--and I never see it.

Sending along a presentation to the analyst is an important thing to do, because we are the ultimate "information overload" group. Literally, I have had a vendor presentation on a Monday and by Wednesday I can't remember what it was about. Some weeks, I'll have eight vendor presentations, some back to back. Trust me, they all blend together after awhile. And I've asked around--all analysts have this problem. We depend on our notes and the vendor presentation as mental crutches. Take away our crutches, and we don't do so well.

So, if you're a vendor, send along your presentation. The analyst will thank you because you've made his or her job easier. 

Off to Lotusphere

I'm off to Lotusphere in Orlando this morning. The gotcha of travel today is all the prelim time. I got up at 5:00 AM so that my wife could drive me to the airport by 6:30, so I could get there by 7:30 for a 9:30 AM flight.

I'm giving a presentation late Monday afternoon entitled, "The Future of Collaboration." Otherwise, I'll just be attending the conference, listening to the keynotes and being shuttled here and there to analyst briefings.

In my view, Lotusphere 2008 wasn't very impressive; I'm hoping that this year's will be better. In 2008, Lotus announced some useful features for the installed base, it talked a lot about futures, but it didn't offer anything groundbreaking that would put Microsoft's SharePoint juggernaut on the defensive. Accordingly, our resulting Burton Group report was entitled, "IBM Lotus 2008: An In-Between Year." It will be interesting to see if this year is more of the some or whether IBM has something up its sleeve that will rock the collaboration, communication, and content world.  

Giving a Webinar Today

For those of you wondering why I've been absent on my blog for awhile, it's because I've been working heads down generating PowerPoint presentations. Most of them are for Burton's Catalyst Conference at the end of June, but one is for a KMWorld webinar I'm giving today, sponsored by Just Systems and XyEnterprise.

The title is, "DITA Comes of Age: Getting Everyone to Generate More Accurate and Relevant Documentation." It talks about some findings from my December report: Content Reuse: DITA, XML, and Other Ways to Keep from Reinventing the Content. If you're interested in the subject, give it a look see. It's free.

CCS Has an Opening

Yes, we're looking for an analyst to join our Collaboration and Content Strategies (CCS) practice at Burton Group. The job posting is on the Careers page on the Burton Group web site; since the company currently has several openings--yes, we're growing--you'll need to scroll down a bit.

Some background. Burton Group is an IT analyst firm; we write reports and consult on IT issues such as security, identity, networking, data center operations, and programming. CCS, the practice I work in, covers collaboration, communications, and content.

Although Burton Group doesn't have as high a profile as Gartner Group and Forrester Research, it is the ninth largest IT analyst firm (according to Outsell), and we should climb up one or two more rungs this year. If you're worried about being a third-party marketing arm for vendors, don't. Burton Group is atypical in that the vast majority of our business comes from enterprises; only a small part of our business comes from vendors (15%). To put this into perspective, some analyst firms get 90% of their revenue from vendors; a typical percentage is in the 30% range. We don't hire analysts out of college; typically, our analysts have worked many years in the business by working in IT, by being product managers, and by being analysts at other firms. I, for example, have done all three.

If you want to be an analyst (at Burton Group, anyway) you need to:

• Know your stuff
• Write well
• Have opinions that you can back up

If you think you have the right stuff, apply by sending your resume to Lynn Ward at [email protected].

AIIM 2008: The Highs and Lows of a Spectrum of Knowledge

I'm about to attend day three of the AIIM Conference. Each year I come to the same conclusion and each year I forget it; I figure this year I'll write it down in a blog post so I won't forget it for next year. The conclusion is: attending the AIIM Conference is a great way to be hit between the eyes with the wide spectrum of knowledge and quality in the content and collaboration space--from cutting-edge vendor demos, to presenters with great insights, to presenters just pitching their wares, to newbie attendees who aren't even sure what "content management" means.

I'll start with the last part. On Tuesday I was joined at the lunch table by two fellows who were just looking for a place to eat--open chairs were few and far between in the Food Court. We got talking, and when they realized I was an industry analyst, they couldn't believe their good fortune, because they had tons of questions:

• "I've heard people use the term 'damn'--what does that mean?" "Ah, they're saying 'DAM,' which stands for 'digital asset management'--those are systems that manage rich media, such as videos and big images."
• "How is SharePoint different from Documentum?" "Documentum is a longtime best-of-breed document management system that helps departments manage really valuable documents. SharePoint is a less-expensive, 'fill in the gaps' collaboration and content management system that helps enterprises track the more mundane, everyday memos."

They must have peppered me with questions for half an hour; a somewhat sobering thought, given that the AIIM Conference is full of attendees who have been doing content management for years. It's worthwhile remembering that those battle-hardened veterans are counterbalanced by those who are just starting out.

Then there's the presentations, which run the gamut. I attended one entitled, "Build Smarter Internal and External Communities via Social Networking Methodologies and Technologies," which was basically a rehash of a five-year-old presentation and ended with, "Please join my network." Not very insightful, and high on the self-promotion quotient. I attended one entitled, "The Future of Text Analytics" given by a Distinguished Engineer from IBM, and he spent most of the time talking about personalization and web analytics. Interesting, but not what I was looking for. On the other hand, I also saw one on implementing a taxonomy at The Hartford Insurance Group, and it was great--full of useful war stories.

Each year I hope the AIIM Conference will be full of only highs--but seeing the gamut of highs and lows can be educational as well.

Burton Group's Response to the ODF Alliance Posted

I've finished posting Burton Group's response to the ODF Alliance’s response to our “What’s Up .DOC?” overview report on ODF and OOXML on the CCS blog. It's in three parts:

• Part 1: Points 1-6
• Part 2: Points 7-12
• Part 3: Points 13-18

Including the ODF Alliance's comments for context, it's pretty long--20 pages in Microsoft Word--which is why I split it up into three parts.

I certainly picked up some interesting tidbits in the course of doing research for the replies. For example: Adobe's Buzzword word processor is supporting OOXML sooner than it's supporting ODF (point 18 in part 3); and ODF supports many more table columns in a word processing document than OOXML [8,192 in ODF, 63 in OOXML] (this is probably because ODF table support is universal across all three applications, including spreadsheets, while the OOXML word processing spec is built with Microsoft Word as the model; point 17 in part 3).

Happy reading!

Response to Ars Technica's Article on the ODF/OOXML Report

Five days ago Ars Technica issued its view of the Burton Group ODF/OOXML report and made it clear that they disagreed with its findings, going with the headline, "Analyst group slams ODF, downplays Microsoft ISO abuses."

We've had some questions from Burton Group clients and others about the article, so I thought it would be worthwhile to go through where we agree, where we disagree, where Ars Technica mischaracterizes what we said, and where it's wrong.

First, a point on which we agree:

• Microsoft's Large Market Share Will Have an Impact: Ars Technica states,  "Statistically, the large market share of Microsoft's office suite will likely ensure that OOXML becomes the industry de facto standard...." We agree. As we state at the beginning of the Analysis section, "... many enterprises are not that caught up in the standards debate; they just want to use what works for their needs. Microsoft Office 2007 defaults to storing documents in OOXML format, so, by migrating to Office 2007, many companies will let Microsoft make the decision for them."

Areas where we disagree:

• Microsoft Doesn't Want to Foster Interoperability: Ars Technica states, "...the veracity of Microsoft's stated intentions to foster interoperability shouldn't be accepted at face value." It's a fact that Microsoft has historically used proprietary file formats and capabilities to gain market advantage over competitors. However, this attitude is dysfunctional in today's more standards-centric world, and we believe that Microsoft--ever the hard-nosed realist--recognizes that. Microsoft has changed its stripes in the past when it made business sense to do so. In the early 1990's it was not partner-friendly, somewhat similar to Apple's go it alone strategy; in the late 1990's it realized that expanding the partner ecosystem would in the long run make it more money, and so it built a large partner network. While Microsoft is not as ODF-friendly as Ars Techica would like it to be, it is definitely getting away from a proprietary lock-out strategy. Mary Jo Foley noted in her blog on January 17th that, "Microsoft is going to put the binary-format documentation on the Web; make a binary-to-OOXML conversion tool available as an open-source license on SourceForge; and make the documentation available under its Open Specification Promise (which is basically MicroSpeak for a pact not to sue)."
• Microsoft Is Consistently Gaming the Standards Process: Ars Technica says, "...there is unequivocal evidence that Microsoft bought votes for OOXML in Sweden and there are compelling allegations that the company has done so in other countries." We noted the Swedish episode in the report, but disagree on the question of degree. The Ars Technica headline, "Microsoft ISO abuses," gives the impression that they are systemic and widespread; we think they are isolated instances. What viewpoint you take probably depends on the story playing in the back of your mind. We think Microsoft is too much of a hard-headed realist to jeopardize votes and market perception by packing the court; others figure Microsoft is just plain evil and has been effective at hiding its nefarious activities. Same set of facts, two different interpretations.
• Sun Is Unfairly Attacked: Ars Technica said, "...the report aggressively attacks Sun with allegations that are completely speculative and unsubstantiated." Multiple interviewees in the ODF camp told us that it was virtually impossible to get anything into ODF in the early days if it wasn't also in OpenOffice.org: that despite all the talk about ODF being open, it was apparently a case of a vendor pushing its own agenda--the same charge that is typically leveled at Microsoft.

Areas where Ars Technica mischaracterized what we said:

• No Mention That ODF and OOXML Will Eventually Give Way to Standards Supporting Hyperlinked Documents: This was probably the most important point we made within the report, and one which Ars Technica neglected to mention.  As we note at the beginning of the Analysis section, "Software as a service (SaaS) productivity applications are bringing mashups and dynamic web-based documents into the enterprise, challenging the long-held idea that a document must be monolithic and static. Over the next decade, standards being put forth by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) may ultimately dominate the document standards domain...."
• Google Apps Report Was a "Scathing Condemnation": Ars Technica says, "...Burton Group issued a report with a scathing condemnation of Google's enterprise productivity suite...." True, we advised our enterprise clients not to adopt it yet, as it was lacking in areas such as role-based administration and records management. However, I wouldn't characterize this paragraph within the report as a "scathing condemnation": "Because the solution is weak compared to best-of-breed point solutions, it will not displace many already installed applications. However, it will appeal to organizations that are comfortable with the SaaS delivery model and are looking for basic features and nothing more, as well as organizations making their first steps in trying out ECM
  and collaboration solutions. In addition, it will serve as a collaboration add-on to Microsoft Office, which is how Google uses it internally." Interestingly, the adoption curve has played out as we called it--large enterprises have stood on the sidelines, with a few of them trying it out in departments, while some SMBs looking for a low-priced alternative to Microsoft Office have adopted it.

Areas where Ars Technica is wrong:

• Burton Group Makes Money Installing SharePoint: Ars Technica says, "Burton Group earns revenue from consulting on enterprise collaboration software installs (think SharePoint) and likely has its own agenda." While Burton Group has a consulting arm, it helps clients draw out a strategic IT roadmap, based on the client's environment and preferred architecture. We do not install software for clients. We do work for Java-centric clients; we do work for Microsoft-centric clients. True--we do have an agenda, which is to advise clients on what would be best for them in a vendor-neutral way. Given that 30% of the client calls into our Collaboration and Content Strategies practice have to do with SharePoint 2007, it would be foolhardy for us to ignore and not write about what Microsoft is doing in this space. However, SharePoint 2007 does not do everything well--the blog and wiki support is pretty dismal, and don't even think of using it for digital asset management--and we tell clients that.

Behind the Scenes of the ODF/OOXML Report

I thought it might be interesting to talk about how one of our reports came together: from its genesis to its publication. In this case I'll talk about our recently released report on ODF/OOXML: What’s Up, .DOC? ODF, OOXML, and the Revolutionary Implications of XML in Productivity Applications.

Although each service draws up a tentative publication schedule at the beginning of the year, this report was not on it. While CCS kept its eye on the ODF vs. OOXML debate, it was not a subject that was top of mind for us. That changed in September 2007, when a client asked me to give a PowerPoint presentation on OOXML to a CIO consortium. I spent several days digging into the subject (studying both ODF and OOXML), put together a 49-slide deck, and spent several hours presenting to him and seven other CIOs. While this was a Microsoft shop trying to figure out the nuances of migrating from Office 2003 to Office 2007, it was clear that OOXML needed to be understood within the context of its competitor, ODF. That got us intrigued.

In Q4 Peter O'Kelly decided he'd write an overview on the subject, building on the technical details I had initially unearthed. He interviewed a wide variety of people and vendors--including Adobe, Altova, IBM, Microsoft, Novell, and Sun--and wrote most of the report. He then passed a draft on to me, which I altered--I added the one-page summary at the front of the Analysis section and made tweaks throughout the document--so we were both in agreement on what it said. We then sent it out to the vendors mentioned above for feedback to make sure it was accurate. They all made comments--some of which we accepted, and some of which we did not. We fixed all the factual errors that were reported back to us, and made a judgment call on the ones that dealt more in tone.

We sent it in to Production (our editing group); the report was published on January 11.