Mark Smith's Analyst Perspectives

Social Media Ignorance in the IT Analyst Industry

Posted by Mark Smith on Jan 17, 2011 2:51:54 PM

Social media, the newest channel of communication across the Internet, is increasingly being used to influence, but also to deliver advice and research. I wrote about this revolution last year (See: “The Social Media Revolution in Industry Analyst Community”), reporting on the transformation that is underway and the work of our firm along with Altimeter Group and dozens of other active industry analysts. While some industry analysts are aggressively engaged in social media, using Twitter and producing blogs, there are many more who apparently do not see any value in the time and energy it takes to engage these new channels. Although the larger IT analyst firms – GartnerForrester, and IDC – have provided channels for their analysts to blog, only  a small percentage of analysts at these firms actually use them. It is useful that IDCForrester, and Gartner have provided a library of their analysts on Twitter that includes their handles, as a review shows that their analysts appear to have viewed the channel as a novelty, giving it a shot in 2009 but doing little since. At least the Forrester listing groups its analysts into research areas; other firms apparently expect you to figure out the focus of their analysts on your own. These are good first steps, but they still don’t make it easy for those who wish to follow them on these channels; they still leave it to you, the reader, to make sense of the different social media identities of their analysts, to figure a Twitter handle from the blog post and visa versa.

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Topics: Social Media, Market Research, Operational Performance Management (OPM), Analytics, Business Intelligence, Business Technology, Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC), Information Technology, Location Intelligence, Operational Intelligence, Business Performance Management (BPM), Customer Performance Management (CPM), Financial Performance Management (FPM), Industry Analyst, Information Applications (IA), Information Management (IM), IT Performance Management (ITPM), Sales Performance Management (SPM), Supply Chain Performance Management (SCPM), Workforce Performance Management (WPM)

SumTotal Provides Clarity in the New Year

Posted by Ventana Research on Jan 6, 2011 8:00:54 PM

The new year started off with a bang in the human capital management software market as SumTotal Systems acquired GeoLearning, a leading learning management system (LMS) software vendor.

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Topics: Learning, Operational Performance Management (OPM), Performance, Cloud Computing, Business Performance Management (BPM), Compensation, Financial Performance Management (FPM), SumTotal Systems, Talent Management, Workforce Analytics, Workforce Performance Management (WPM)