As I wind up the preparations for our next SOA event in New York, on Monday and Tuesday, I was pleased and flattered to read James McGovern's kind words about how our planning process for this event responded to his critique of our last one. For the record, his wasn't the only pushback we got. All our feedback told us to bring in more practioners whose been-there-done-that perspectives would resonate with attendees and keep vendors on their toes. Nor was I the only one to recruit more of these folks this time around. It was very much a team effort.
James concludes by posing another challenge:
I feel like I am sliding down a slope of disillusionment with industry analysts, maybe in a future column you could talk about the notion of open source industry analysis?He has of course noted what the Redmonk duo are up to. They are demonstrating the value of greater transparency and more public engagement. To me this looks like an obvious win-win. But although the word analyst appears in my job title, I'm not walking in the shoes worn at Redmonk or Forrester or Gartner.
Recently, for example, I had the opportunity to meet Randy Heffner, a Forrester VP who thinks and speaks brilliantly about service-oriented architecture. (We hoped to bring him to our event, but scheduling didn't permit that.) Would open sourcing a bit more of what he does make sense? That's a conversation that needs to happen between providers of fee-based content and their customers. As it unfolds, I'll be listening -- to as much of it as I can hear, that is.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2005/11/04.html#a1334