Community Oriented Analysis

There is an argument to say that an analyst firm with partnership and community principles at its core can never be as powerful as one that puts everything behind exclusively driving its own brand and authority. It is a line of reasoning that I heard frequently in the last company I worked in and it was a contributing factor to me ultimately moving on.

There is a difference, you see, between analysts being pleasant to each other on ‘the circuit’ and actually collaborating – by which I mean at the very minimum having an open and trusted exchange of information and ideas. Those who know Freeform Dynamics will be aware that it was built with collaboration as a founding principle from the outset, and we have maintained our commitment to this approach as we have grown and developed.

Now I know that some have had a snipe at us for our collaborative approach, saying the only reason for working with other firms when we started out was because we didn’t have the capability to go it alone. The reality is, though, that having spent over a decade as a business development professional in the tech sector, I formed the view many years ago that the partnership approach to doing business generally represents the next level of maturity after the traditional closed and defensive model.

Coming to the point of this post, the community or ecosystem model then takes maturity to the next level again, as illustrated by the three words that are most important to success for companies going down this route – confidence, trust and respect.

To me, and others like Redmonk, MWD, TekPlus and a few others, it made sense to bypass the intermediate steps that most businesses go through, the ‘growing up’ process if you like, and jump straight in at the highest maturity level. Ambitious, risky? Well not really if you have confidence in your own capability, have a naturally trusting mindset, and genuine respect for others.

Now as an analyst firm, if you extend the collaborative community idea to the way in which you interact with your various audiences, then you are taking the process of ‘analysis’ to the next level of maturity too. Firms like Redmonk and MWD were way ahead of us in this area, and when Freeform came into being, we just joined the party. I like to think that we added some elements into the mix with our community research model and Freeform methodology, but hat tip to James Governor in particular as an early pioneer of ‘community oriented analysis’ – he didn’t call it that, but I think this is a better description than the handle ‘open source analysis’, which has caused a bit of confusion.

Anyway, it is no surprise that the words confidence, trust and respect come into the equation here too, and there is a fundamental difference in mindset between community oriented analysts and traditional ‘old school’ analyst firms – the main one being that rather than adopting the role of ‘elite authority’, the community oriented guys think of themselves more as peers of the people they are advising or providing insight to. Their role then becomes that of a ‘catalyst’ rather than ‘preacher’, and their advice is as much based on aggregating, analysing and adding value to input from the buying and using community, as it is on more traditional means.

To underline the difference, if you really want insight into the real practicalities of managing a BlackBerry Enterprise Server, for example, the person who is likely to know best is the one managing a 2,000 user BlackBerry installation day in day out – not some analyst that has sat through two days of briefings in shiny offices in Canada or has made RIM fill out reams of paperwork so they can be placed on a subjective and theoretical assessment framework. Community oriented analysts acknowledge and respect that the real experts are often out there in the community, so the real value comes from harnessing community experience, combining it with sound analysis, and deriving insight and guidance that is grounded in the real world. All of the community oriented firms I have mentioned do this in one way or another in their various domains of coverage and expertise.

The proof of the pudding, of course, is in the eating, and I have to say that we receive a lot of feedback telling us that the community oriented model makes a refreshing change to the ‘market making’ approach of the big analyst incumbents, who tend to maintain one eye on end user needs and the other on inventing the next pseudo-disruptive concept and accompanying jargon to stimulate the coming quarter’s research renewals and consulting sales. Now don’t get me wrong, I respect what the big incumbent’s do, and acknowledge the need for organisations with a huge critical mass of resource to do all of the nitty gritty detailed product comparisons and hand hold certain customers during the buying cycle, but in a world in which most organisations have enough change to deal with already, let’s not pretend that the introduction of disruption motivated mostly by the disrupter’s business agenda rather than the customer’s is always beneficial to the buying community.

I’ll leave it at that for now and round off by saying that community oriented analysis, which by definition has the buyer and user community interests and priorities at its foundation, has an important and complementary role to play, which I predict will become relatively more important over time. It is, after all, a much more mature and empathetic approach.