I just came across one of Gartner's most recent publications (predictions, trends, ...).<p>I'm finding it hard to distill through the fluff to find meaningful insights.
Their trends are dated and it feels as if someone has spilled the buzzword paint on a slide deck.<p>I'm experiencing first-hand the mess they have caused by suggesting an operational/outsourcing model that makes it extremely hard to get anything done other than planning.<p>How are they still relevant?
Is there a better corporate insights and research firm that you know of?<p>Their trends seem dated because they're not going to feed enterprises bleeding edge tech trends; they're going to go with trends that are mostly proven, so yes at that point they're probably going to be a bit stale. Large enterprises with minimal tech advocacy/leadership in the senior leadership team eat this stuff up because they don't know much better.<p>Frankly, if your business is struggling with operations to a point where they are bringing in third parties to get told to outsource operations, I feel like your business has a competency problem that you can't place squarely on the shoulders of Gartner.
There is a lot more to it than those magic quadrants and articles that vendors send you. It’s not really fair to pick out an article or two and then say they are crap. It seems to be the cool thing to pick on them and most of the people that do have basically zero experience with them. I suspect most of the bad rap comes from the bullshit ads vendors send out that reference some Gartner article.<p>When you sign up with them you are assigned an executive partner who helps develop your strategy, you get access to over a thousand analysts that are SME’s in various fields, access to a massive library of articles and it’s a good networking opportunity. The EP is where it’s at. It’s someone with a lot more experience than you have who you can work with directly, bounce ideas off of, get advice from, etc. I guess sort of a mentor for hire is one way to look at it. I know people that swear by Gartner and renew year after year.<p>That said, it wasn’t a great fit for me. I don’t want to call it a complete waste, but it wasn’t worth it. I am apparently an outlier among their clients because they have a very high retention rate.
Most of Gartner's income comes from serving as a sort of strategic IT help desk rather than from the publications you cite. They provide as much of a sanity check for enterprise/commercial IT decision making as a customer desires.<p>Individually, their experts are actually pretty knowledgeable IMHO more so on average than IT executives tend to be. There are many morons out there in decision making roles and there are many worse advisors than Gartner e.g. "advisors" who are unduly influenced by vendor payoffs (1st hand knowledge not supposition).
Don't look at them as providing advice. Look at them as providing these two things:<p>* They provide assurance against bad decisions. Every exec wants to have someone to point at when a few millions were wasted. Don't get me wrong here. The job of a higher-up exec probably implies wasting a few millions every now and then by taking the best course in adverse circumstances.<p>* They provide a neutral judge for execs surrounded by warring factions - and they don't even have to be internal. At our company I see how A is a sane option, but B is used by a competitor. Even if said competitor bleeds money as a result, we regularly hire the same contractors, and they love reusing their investment and see you bleed money (to them) by giving you also B. What do you do while they whisper in the ear of your boss?<p>When companies get big enough to become vulnerable to sociological dysfunctionality, Gartner can help a lot. Or make things much worse.
I've found the Gartner hype cycle paradigm to be vastly overrated after experiencing real hype cycles in several industries.<p>If you examine their hype cycle charts over about a decade, you'll notice that technologies join or leave the chart randomly, and very few actually move in a linear fashion along the hype cycle: the charts offer no real predictive power.<p>I think the "hype cycle" narrative only matches a small fraction of tech innovations. Sometimes tech is adopted in a fairly smooth sigmoid. Sometimes it dies suddenly pre-plateau because it was actually vaporware or a substitute became more competitive. Sometimes there's a single giant hype cycle (dot-com?). Sometimes there are several repeating cycles (looking at you today, cryptocurrencies).
I’ve heard it claimed that those in leadership use it to justify the purchase of a product. Sort of a “nobody ever got fired for buying what Gartner recommended.”
Executives hire Gartner to tell them in PowerPoint format for $100,000 what their own engineers/professionals could have told them for free over lunch if they ever actually got out of their offices and talked to the people who run the nuts and bolts of the company.
Gartner provides plausible deniability for inevitable leadership mistakes. "Hey, it was in the Magic Quadrant! It wasn't our fault our implementation failed!"
At one point a few years back, while people were being holier-than-thou agile evangelists, Gartner was putting forth well reasoned arguments about having steady slow teams and innovative fast teams. Pretty much arguing an end run around the whole Agile-everything political movement in a way that an Enterprise would be able to benefit from what they know works and also from the Agile development front.
It’s what happens when you have too many non-technical people in decision-making positions. They never heard of big O notation or hashsets but they all know about Gartner.<p>It provides a way for them to say “I think we should do X” without knowing anything about X except that Gartner recommended it. Gartner gives them a right to have an opinion.
Gartner is useful because they have tons of data on just about anything in the IT space. The Magic Quadrant is the tip of the iceberg and the thing that people know they for best, but they do tons of research (as they are a research company), which helps people in leadership positions who need to make big technical decisions make those decisions (with help from other data points, of course). They also have the whole "every IT exec uses Gartner; why aren't you" effect going for them.
They speak with customers who have purchased product X. Although most T&C prevent sharing pricing information with others, customers will share that info with Gartner. Want to buy product X, how do you know you’re getting a fair price? That’s where Gartner earns its value. Did you remember to negotiate for future price lock-in for “no greater than”? Gartner will advise you on what to look out for and how to negotiate your contracts.
In a world with information asymmetry, Gartner helps deobfuscate the pricing.
It's still relevant because it's for job security.<p>When IT management needs to decide which product/service to use, they need to explain to the business (e.g. front office) why they choose A instead of B. Showing the report helps.<p>When product/service A messes up, IT management needs to come up with an explanation on why they've chosen a bad product/service. Showing other products/services look even worse in the report again helps. In other words, the chosen one is already one of the best in the market.<p>Given that the company pays for the report, why would IT management not ask for a copy as it costs them nothing?<p>This is not to say all IT management uses it to make their job safe but they can't lose by using those products/services in the report. In other words, they are taking enormous risk using a product not suggested/covered in the report and what would be their incentive to do so especially having gone through the financial crisis?
If you’re purchasing or renegotiating something for the first time on a large scale (say a monitoring tool or key—value database) a 30 minute call with one of their analysts can save you hundreds of thousands of dollars. They add an enormous sales team on top of that.
Bullshit companies like this (they aren't alone - there is also Accenture, Deloitte, and plenty others) will be around as long as there are idiots who believe in their bullshit and are happy to pay them good money to produce it.
In a corporate IT environment this is a cheap way for IT professionals to augment local skills especially for high-level strategy and planning. I always found it useful to quote from Gartner reports in internal reports -- an easy way to summarise an issue.<p>You do need to push past the buzzwords and it needs to be used with some care by non-IT people who cannot always see the corporate implications of some recommendations.<p>Gartner conferences are also good value.
1. Gartner charge vendors money for their services and they charge clients for distributing their. ‘Knowledge’.<p>2. If you could see the $$ signs charged to vendors by Gartner for every vendor they list in the magic Quadrant would it colour your opinion of the magic quadrant and their recommendations ?<p>Journalists who have a vested interest have to declare it in any report - why should Gartner be any different ?
It's relevant the way organizations like CNN are. In an age where there's very little information asymmetry and everybody's equally an expert, legacy brands serve as a credentialing baseline.
90% of the working world has at best indifference and at worst outright hostility to technology, and research firms are IT equivalent of the Gell Mann Amnesia.<p>In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king.<p>You are an outlier. Take advantage of it, but also don't overvalue it.
Here's a part of the answer. They surround themselves with the trappings of power. They know how to "speak" the nonverbal language of power, how to do it well, and they never fail to do it.<p>That is probably some huge fraction of it, right there.
I wonder what their accuracy rate is? I imagine there's a bias towards them looking good because people accept their suggestions ("nobody got fired for buying IBM") and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.