A Bit of a Restructure

It’s been very busy here recently at Freeform Dynamics. Josie’s new arrival, a number of new projects, and an increase in coverage have given us pause for thought – and as a result we’ve looked at how we are structured as a company, both to fit with our current commitments and to give us further room for growth moving forward.

So, we have organized ourselves into three loosely knit teams: a technology-oriented team and a people-oriented team (or as Dale has characterized them, the "geek squad" and the "peep squad") for research coverage, and Freeform Central to co-ordinate project activities. Let’s take a look at them.

The technology-oriented team comprises Tony Lock, Jon Collins and Martin Atherton. Tony will lead general infrastructure and its operational management – so, servers, storage and networking, virtualisation and provisioning, service management and security. Jon picks up the software side of things – think SOA, development, information and content management for example. And Martin’s remit is to consider how all of that aligns with the business in terms of governance and compliance, service delivery and so on. There are overlaps and fuzzy boundaries between all of these things, so the team will continue to work closely together and cover for each other but this should give you an indication of who should be the first port of call for each subject, and who should be copied in.

The people-oriented team is made up of Dale Vile, Josie Sephton and David Tebbutt. Dale will continue to look at IT strategy and the user experience, including desktop and mobility. Josie is our lead analyst on the service provider side, also taking a view on emerging markets. Finally, David Tebbutt covers collaboration, social networking and sustainability across both IT and the business. Again, there are clear cross-overs between these roles, and indeed between the two teams but it gives a starting point and helps us when it comes to tasking primary research activities.

Freeform Central will be led by Helen Vile and Martin Atherton, and supported by Dale Vile and Linsey Berry. The role of Freeform Central is to co-ordinate projects and provide shared research services across the team – though individuals will still be responsible for co-ordinating their own briefings and managing enquiries! This last bit is important – while we want to operate efficiently, we don’t want to put any barriers between our core audience and the team. Meanwhile, this will enable us to continue to build our corpus of research-based insight, which we are rapidly understanding is seen by our customers as our major differentiator. This will be expanded on in a future post.

We hope this makes sense – if you have any questions, please let us know. Onward and upward!

AR guys struggling with blogs

There is an interesting post over here from Carter Lusher discussing the difficulties the AR community is encountering with the whole phenomenon of analysts blogging.

Carter lays out a segmentation model that might help with this, but I cannot help thinking that the approach is missing the point a little. I have been on record before as saying that while I blog, I do not define myself ‘Blogger’ with a capital ‘B’, and I am sure the same can be said of most other analysts that make use of blogs as just one medium through which they communicate.

To my mind, the AR people out there might do better figuring out which analysts matter to them, for whatever reason, from buyer influence to the insights they provide, then tracking all of their output (or at least that which is relevant to you) through whatever mechanism. Whether it is a firm branded blog, a personal blog, twitter, a column or article in a traditional publication, or more formal output driven out through research notes and reports, it shouldn’t really matter – monitoring should be analyst or firm centric rather than medium centric.

With a decent RSS reader, use of free aggregation services, and the relevant filters and watches in place, keeping tabs on most forms of electronic output nowadays should not be that big a deal – should it? There are even analyst blog and twitter directories that various people maintain, so you don’t even have to do the leg work to know who is publishing what and where.

Perhaps what is needed is AR training on some of the basic technology and techniques that can help to automate the monitoring process, or at least take a lot of the pain out of it.

Then again, I am not an AR person, so perhaps it is a lot harder than it looks from the outside.