Introduction

• IT analysts provide very high level and inaccurate information about IT. They also have large numbers of financial conflicts.
• We review IT analyst provided information.

#2: IT Analysts

IT analysts generally produce simplistic output and never disclose their financial conflicts to software vendors, as covered in The Problem With How Gartner Makes Their Money.

Virtually none of the employees in IT analysts had any experience in research before joining these companies, and these usually are very sales-oriented organizations that give salespeople titles like “Distinguished Analyst.” However, companies take IT analysts like Gartner, Forrester, IDC, and others seriously and use their output to make IT decisions. As we like to say, the major IT analysts sell fake research to people who do not know what research is.

This is a web credibility measurement for the website of Gartner.com

IT Analyst Produced Marketing Collateral Paid for By Vendors

If one pays the right amount for many of these companies, they will publish what they want, as covered in the article How To Understand Forrester’s Fake S/4HANA TCO Study.

In our analysis of most of the prominent IT analysts covered in the article The Problem With IT Analysts Like Gartner, Forrester, and More, we found that not a single one produced output that was not highly influenced by these industry interests. (To see our IT research page see this link.)

The Reality of Private Sector Research

Private-sector research is almost entirely based on pleasing some influential entity and telling them what they want to hear. Two entities that have effectively gone against this in the private sector have been RAND and Consumer Reports. See how the IT analyst Gartner compares against these real research entities; see the article How Gartner’s Research Compares to Real Research Entities.

As public funding for US universities has declined and been replaced by grants from private companies, which is usually a way for the private company to extract IP from the public sector (which is very prevalent in medical research), the freedom of expression, and independence in academic research have both declined precipitously.

Why Good Research Or Advisory Can Never Be Profit Maximized

The secret to good research is not to maximize profit, and profit maximization is the end of proper research. One of the most prolific research entities in human history was Bell Labs. For decades Bell Labs was funded by the monopoly AT&T. However, after AT&T was broken up and Bell Labs was made more “market-driven” and more focused on profits, Bell Labs went into a steep decline.

The Reality of Research in Enterprise Software

This video shows how an analytics solution can be used to show the Gartner MQ changing over time. This video illustrates the common problem with analytics — which is that it creates the analytics without any analysis as to whether Gartner’s Magic Quadrant has any validity. This is common in the enterprise software space, where none of the financial biases or claims are fact-checked. If you use an advanced analytics tool, but you don’t apply any critical thinking, nor do you know the domain — the result is false insight. 

There is virtually no analysis of Gartner in the enterprise software space. As we cover in the article How to Understand Why IT Lacks Functioning Research Entities Covering SAP, virtually no entities perform research or have independence from vendors and consulting firms in the enterprise software space.

The enterprise software space is brainless from a research perspective. Companies do not bother to check the accuracy of firms like Gartner. All that is normally necessary is for an established brand to say something is true.

The Necessity of Validating Advisory Information and Research

We hope the case has been made that there are many problems with advisory information and research. The major problem is that the entities providing this information do their utmost to hide their financial conflicts, exaggerations, and distortions.

We constantly review advisory documents and research, which gives us an advantage over those who only occasionally review this material.

Hiring Us

As you can see, if you have made it this far, it is challenging to obtain accurate information from the entities listed above.

• Virtually all of the research, consulting, and advice that can be purchased is aligned with established interests.
• If you have purchased research or consulting information, we can be hired to evaluate and provide our analysis. We can provide a number of different types of analyses of the material that will enhance your decision-making abilities and help moderate the influence of the types of poor quality information that we have profiled in this article.
• We can also be hired to investigate topics and perform original research on technology topics.

Contacting Us

You can contact us at support@brightworkresearch.com