Ask HN: Why and how is Gartner Inc. still relevant?
I just came across one of Gartner's most recent publications (predictions, trends, ...).
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.
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.
How are they still relevant?
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[ 2.0 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadSo much budget will be spent on this project that it will be deemed Too Big To fail. The shitty software will sit underused for a few years until everyone forgets about it then it will be quietly sunsetted.
It's sort of like a corporate job creation scheme.
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.
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).
Gartner also sells research and analysis reports, and subscriptions for these services. These materials, IME, are of higher quality and can be a good introduction or exploration of a particular issue or technology. But they are definitely more oriented toward the senior leader than to the person in the trenches.
Engineers wanting shiny resume padding to play with can hate on it all they want, but they're not the ones doing the firing.
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.
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.
Some might describe Gartner as a company that dispenses reasonable advice on demand to companies who need guidance on subjects well outside their core competencies. This is very much making money from incompetence, but it's the sort of profiting from incompetence that every expert adviser does.
As for the thread at hand, I second the answer that Gartner exists to provide executives a backstop of something goes wrong. People dont often get fired for buying something in the magic quadrant.
Being able to talk to someone with some clue and have access to generally well thought out papers is useful. If you’re an SME in an area, they may give you additional perspective.
If you just read the Magic Quadrant for Business Process outsourcing or whatever and just call the top one, you are dumb. Conversely, if you’re going to be making a purchase in the space, and have never heard of 2/5 vendors on the top right, you may be missing something.
Why hire a strategic analyst with executive experience for 5 years if all they are going to tell you is 5% more than a Gartner consultant can offer you for 1/10th the annual salary?
To use your analogy, why should this hypothetical retailer hire an in-house team if they can get everything they need from another party for cheaper, with a small opportunity cost? And why is knowing which detergent to purchase making you any less reliant on the comparative specialisation of the supermarket?
A semi-informed decision is better than just believing the salespeople. Most software/systems in the magic quadrant aren't bad choices.
I think the siblings post (Gartner exists to gobble up money from incompetence) is closer to home. A semi-informed decision really isn't better. I'm not saying that making your decisions based on marketing hype is a good idea, by any stretch (which is what salespeople and marketing people will base their decision on usually). But outside consultants are really dangerous because they are targets (if not willing participants) in orchestrated attacks against your company. At best they will be trying to extract hundreds of thousands of dollars from you. At worst they will be trying to sink you deliberately. If you go with your salespeople's recommendation, the worst you will get is a bad ERP, WMS, or HR management system. A management consultant can cripple your operations if you follow their advice blindly.
You may think that hard to believe, but I've lived through it enough times to be doubly cautious.
[1] https://go.forrester.com/
Not to derail your points; but their trends publication included a framework that is no longer supported. It could’ve taken an intern one minute to update.
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.
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).
Exactly.
No-one gets fired for buying the vendor in the top-right corner of a Gartner matrix...
I'm also amused by vendors (often start-ups) releasing PRs about being listed in a Gartner Hype Cycle report. "Look we're here, at the top!". i.e. overhyped...
It's outside validation, which to a prospective customer is more useful than those "content marketing" pieces these companies put out, which are usually thought pieces about problems in the target industry. Of course, they make sure to liberally sprinkle references to their own SaaS and how cheap and easy it is to switch from your existing BI/CRM/cloud solution.
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.
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.
That said, there are a million different conceptual frameworks out there and Gartner only specialise in a handful.
"Lots of people have succeeded with Brand A, but we failed... so I guess it must our fault."
That is probably some huge fraction of it, right there.
In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king.
You are an outlier. Take advantage of it, but also don't overvalue it.
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.
Gartner conferences are also good value.
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 ?
Journalists who have a vested interest have to declare it in any report - why should Gartner be any different ?
* 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.
* 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?
When companies get big enough to become vulnerable to sociological dysfunctionality, Gartner can help a lot. Or make things much worse.