01/11/09 :: [SOA] Analysts are Dead, Long Live IT [permalink]

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If this deeply and totally stupid discussion has proven one thing is that as of 1/1/2009 analysts are dead. The people that make their living by listening to rumors, that collect a couple of data points and pompously write "research" papers about their Starbucks discussions, are gone. They won't be funded in 2009. No more Psychedelic Quadrant, no more bogus measures about product capabilities and market numbers, no more SOA-EDA-WOA crap. They not only can't make up their mind (how could they just by talking here or there over coffee), the direction they set is as bogus as their approach to set a direction for IT.

Analysts have eradicated any effort to get it right, to build the right products and deliver the value that customers need so desperately. They single handedly ruined our industry by:

  •  driving good architects to adopt the same tactics and slowly drift to using bogus claims to stir the technology pot to their advantage
  • enabling the emergence of a group of pseudo-architects who write white papers and guidance all day and say whatever they want (there will always be an analyst to say this is great, since they heard it from an "architect")
  • discouraging architects that try to put some sense behind all this. Their management or their management's management come to them and tell them, but what you are telling is "failing". Why should we invest there? Their message is geeky (no, CxOs don't need to understand XML extensibility) by nature and yes, this stuff requires that you scratch your head a little bit. That don't seem to be a capability that comes with the vast majority of analysts.

As they understand that they are increasingly becoming irrelevant, they decided to take a "Paris Hilton" approach to their recommendation: the more dramatic, the more audience they would get.

Analysts should be all over people like Dave Orchard and have him explain them how Service Versioning plays in an SOA, why is it critical to reuse and why the lack of a service versioning strategy could explain some low ROI. Do they even understand what Service Versioning is? There are many people who have spent their career to get this stuff right and there are many smart people that get it. But that does not "sell". How come Gartner can still come up with a new acronym and make the "news". How come Anne writes a post with no facts and totally bogus claims and that makes the "news". This wonderful system works like People Magazine and Paris Hilton. They can't exist without each other. As sad as it may be, some people have even successfully injected that way of thinking in the IEEE itself.

There are a few analysts who are still doing the (valuable) job that we are expecting them to do. The CBDI Forum comes to mind.