What's the point of Industry Analysts?

Chris Anderson's Free! book is spot on. Put simply, anything that can be digitized will be free; and that includes industry analysis at least in it's current incarnation. So, what does that mean for Industry Analyst (IA) companies? The last recession has substantially reduced our industry and will cause some shakeout. What is happenning, though, is a change in the market needs from monolithic answers to generic questions (e.g., from Gartner, and Yankee in the form of reports) to systems that allow people to do their own calculations.

In other words, rather than IA companies saying "Read my report as a replacement for thinking", people want IA to say "Help me think".

The entire IA industry needs to realize that the majority of our clients can do most of the work themselves. What is it that IA can do better than companies themselves. There are three reasons why IA companies can do something better than the clients themselves:

1. Independence: because IA companies are not aligned to companies, they can be a filter of information which would not be otherwise put into the public domain
2. Coordinator: in the same vein as technological organizations such as the IEEE, independent coordination by someone to represent the telecom industry's general interests needs to be done by someone
3. Big thinking: analysts have more time to think than clients and can see emerging trends that are not big enough to justify executive thinking
   

What does that mean for the future of the industry?

• Syndicated data and analysis is fundamentally flawed as a business model. IA companies want it for the singular purpose of being scaleable. But it's fundamentally worthless and serves for marketing only
• There is no clear reason why anything scaleable has value. If it's scaleable, then it's not unique. The benefits of size are weaker than before -- Gartner and Forrester's former strengths (their size) -- will create less and economy of scale. Only sales channel, and brand awareness, benefit from size.

If only sales and brand benefit from scale, then the small players need to consolidate their sales and brand channels. It is in the small players' interest to promote the thinking that syndicated work is not valuable.

Coordination between the small players means that a loose -- single contract -- arrangement can provide highly customized advisory and promotion services. Why shouldn't a union of providers that includes Yankee Group, Telecom TV, a PR company, Ovum and Telegeography, with perhaps consulting from IDC analysts mixed with m:metrics data... you get the feel! This combination would be more potent than a Gartner or Forrester relationship... it would be a bigger force than them!