Brian Prentice

…one giant leap for me!

Now, I think this might be something like the 193,846,963^rd blog in the world. Luckily for me the Gartner branding affords me the luxury of being able to cut through a little bit of the noise your average blogger might face. So, I think I owe you a little perspective on how I’ll be tackling this blog.

An analyst’s relationship with technology can be compared to visiting a restaurant. Some analysts have very specific tastes. They order off the menu looking for the dishes that match their preferences. And, after accumulating a wealth of knowledge eating similar stuff, they can quickly rank the quality of any meal and the chef who cooked it. These are the a la carte analysts of the world.

Then you have those analysts that want a little taste of everything – in part because they can’t make up their minds and in part because they’re gluttons. That’s the buffet analyst. What these analysts lack in specific area of expertise they can hopefully make up in their ability to fuse diverse flavors into a new cuisine. I’m one of these types of analysts.

So while I’m prone to becoming infatuated with specific technologies, those infatuations are fleeting. On the other hand I find myself continually drawn to the confluence of non-technical stuff that shapes our industry and ultimately sets the scene for which specific technologies survive, flourish or evaporate. So what is it that I’m being drawn to nowadays? Here are a couple of issues I’ve been obsessing over lately:

The Future of Property & Ownership in the IT Industry

Who owns what and what’s worth owning? This is shaping up to be one of the most important questions facing every participant in the IT industry. Gartner has been seeing more and more organizations questioning the cost-benefit equation key technology. Many are now proactively working in conjunction with like-minded organizations to dissolve traditional ownership structures using open source. At the same time, important changes in the legal and legislative world are creating a new set of assets that directly impact IT. Like it or not, patents are allowing innovative ideas to have their own intrinsic value before they’ve actually been codified! At the heart of the upheaval is a growing understanding of what constitutes commodity vs. market differentiating technology and a desire to align cost and external relationship with the value delivered from each. The more this evolves the more we’re going to have to question some of the fundamental tenets that the IT industry has been built upon.

The Waning of the Engineer

A year or so ago I was watching an interview with the lead designer at Jaguar. She noted that the lack of respectable design in the automotive industry in the 70’s and 80’s was a result of engineers leading the product development process. Design was something done at the end of the process. There was a good reason for this – the market was putting value on stuff the engineers were good at doing. Specifically, creating fuel efficient engines to deal with rising gas prices, improving the performance of the 4 cylinder engines needed to increase fuel efficiency and then improving the safety of these new small, higher performance cars. That was until the 90’s. By that point the incremental engineering improvements in fuel efficiency, performance and safety were becoming less marketable then the emotional connection people had with their cars. As a result the automotive industry altered its development process front-loading designers and having engineers work to support design objectives. I am firmly of the view that the IT industry has reached a similar nexus. The incremental value of what engineers are doing is taking a back seat to the value that designers can add to the technology. Engineering will never go away. I’m just not sure they should be running the show anymore.

So, I hope I’ve been able to give you a taste of where I’m coming from. Now, off I go into the wild blog yonder…