In a post about collaboration, of all things, a Gartner analyst shows how not to interact with his blog’s readers. If you’re a frequent reader of Jim Sinur’s blog, you know that in most posts he invites conversation with open-ended questions at the end, e.g., “What is your experience with this issue”, presumably to feed ideas into his research on the topic at hand.
In this post, he refers to the increasing number of BPM vendors that are including collaboration features, and his first commenter asks him to list some of those vendors. Jim’s response? “We will be writing research notes on this topic going forward that will identify those vendors that have unique solutions.” In other words, “I’m happy to collect your ideas for free as part of my research, but you have to pay for the results.”
I did drop a big hint however, that folks should look to vendors who surround Microsoft’s SharePoint. I think I walked the line between free information and where Gartner makes it’s money. We all have to eat you know š
I understand the need to keep some information for the paying customers, but I don’t think that listing a few of the vendors would have taken food out of anyone’s mouth š
Sandy – Agree that a simple list of related companies would be in order. If that’s enough to drop the value of the full coverage, then Houston? We have a problem!
Keep us all honest Sandy – need to make sure the ivory towers don’t get too high, or we are all doomed to be stuck thoroughly within the hype cycle! š
Cheers,
Dan