There has been much discussion across the global industry analyst relations sites of late about what makes a great boutique analyst firm. While I agree with much of the discussion I couldn’t disagree more about the role of the star analyst. I actually believe that star analysts gave the industry a bad name and are a poor substitute for the long-term sustainable management of any professional advisory company. 

However, I do believe the cultural influence that great analysts can add to a company is unassailable. I’ll be the first to admit that I hired the guy with the highest standards in the industry and that working hard to keep him happy in terms of IP, customer standards, and culture has been a driving force in our success. But let’s drop the self-delusion. Not all star analysts think alike, and I think the best of them realise that they are ultimately a cog in the wheel.

Back in April I completed a sailing trip from Hobart Tasmania, to Bateman's Bay on the NSW south coast. There were three of us on a 46 foot ketch (a two-masted yacht). From a departure point near Wineglass Bay on Tasmania's east coast we headed north east into and across Bass Strait before dropping anchor in Eden harbour just before dawn on Day 3 after 47 sleepless hours at sea.

On the first night in the Strait we ran into a strong gale with wind gusts up to 47 knots and seas of up to 5 metres. It was an uncomfortable night and quite fatiguing. But the real challenge came for us towards the back end of that leg when having passed Gabo Island and only a few hours from port we had a navigational system shut down just as we entered the shipping lanes off Australia's south east corner.

Our yacht was using a PC-based navigation system and at a critical time Windows decided to do an automatic shut-down-re-boot which took down our systems while we were within 1 NM of a 2,000 tonne South African tanker somewhere out there in pitch black conditions at 2am.

Needless to say that after surviving that not-so-fun episode all Windows-based technology has now been removed from the yacht and I picked up a new appreciation for the "business" criticality and reliability of technology.

This blog is written in response to Gideon Gartner's blog "Advisory Industry, a future redesign: the “Payment” Model". As I called out in two blogs in 2007 Gartner is now a small fish in a big pond as it attempts to compete in the larger management consulting market.

As such neither it nor Forrester or IDC can achieve organic growth and catapult themselves into the 10’s of billions of dollars of revenues (and higher profit margins) that the wider industry commands. For that reason I completely agree with Gideon that the required changes to existing pricing models in the ICT analyst advisory market are unrealistic in today’s environment. However, the “king of change” as Gideon called it in one response is well within reach of the firms that stand capable of changing and re-educating the industry.

Sometimes the problem with being as big as IBM is simply that. At some point there are simply not enough marketing messages to go around. Back in October last year at the Information on Demand event in Las Vegas IBM's execs would have had us believe that next generation business applications will unequivocally be BI led with some analytics thrown in to boot. This was an obvious retort to a similar line of messaging from Larry Ellison at Open World earlier in the year.

Now today at Lotusphere 2010 in Orlando we are being asked by other IBM execs to accept that Lotus Notes (the enterprise collaborative suite-platform) is the window to the corporate soul (the entry point for corporate information platform). Now while it is a compelling argument, in all seriousness what is the story and how must a CIO or CEO choose?

I read some great books over the Christmas break. One was a longitudinal study on the characteristics of a breakthrough company (and why Gartner was not considered one by the author), and the other was on competing in business through the use of analytics.

Regardless of the titles and topics, both focused heavily on the importance of understanding customers. No rocket science there but that's the fascinating thing about customer service. Attention to the little things pays big returns. Of course the opposite is also true.