Lydia Leong

Does this picture describe your IT project plan? Evidence indicates that it is illustrative of a significant percentage of the plans of the clients that I speak with, once I probe beneath the glossy surface of false confidence.

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Excerpt: Click here to read the original.
I am a big fan of Amazon’s Kindle. People like Roy Blount fear it, but smart guys like Seth Godin really get it. Authors shouldn’t fear the future. Devices like the Kindle open up a wealth of opportunities to authors who are willing to seize them.

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I have found at a partial solution to my communication proliferation problem. The tool I’m employing, at least for the moment, is Digsby, a free client that combines cross-platform instant messaging with access to social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. This has replaced my usual IM client (Trillian, which I like a lot), [...]

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I’ve recently read Pete Blackshaw’s Satisfied Customers Tell Three Friends, Angry Customers Tell 3000, which is a well-written, methodical introduction to consumer-generated media (CGM, also known as UGC, user-generated content). I’d recommend the book to anyone who hasn’t read a book on the topic; if you’re social-media savvy, chances are you won’t learn much (if [...]

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A client recently asked me what my Clifton Strengths are. I couldn’t remember at the time, but I’ve dug out old 1.0 results from back in 2006…
Ideation. People strong in the Ideation theme are fascinated by ideas. They are able to find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena. Strategic. People strong in the Strategic [...]

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Back in 2005, my colleague Monica Basso and I wrote a research note titled, “Wide Array of Communications Overwhelms Users“. In it, we pointed out that the proliferation of communication mechanisms and the complex intermixing of personal and business communications would become increasingly unmanageable.
Until a few months ago, Gartner had a policy that disallowed analysts [...]

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I’ve recently discovered TripIt through LinkedIn, which has an app to link in TripIt travel plans.
I’ve got to say, it’s pretty awesome. Forward your confirmation emails to it, and it will automatically build them into travel plans. I normally get PDFs via American Express. But my trips are a multi-email jumbled mess of multiple cities, [...]

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Gartner is hiring! Here’s the formal job posting: Research Director, Emerging Enterprise Network Services, Europe. (Or you can go to Gartner Careers and search for req 7705BR.)
Informally, here’s the scoop:
My team is looking for a European counterpart for me — someone who will be European-based, European-focused, and cover Internet infrastructure services and other emerging network [...]

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January was a crazy, crazy month, and February looks to be shaping up to be just as intensive, if not more so.
During January, in the fifteen available working days (the days not completely consumed by travel or by our research planning process), I had one hundred interactions — one hundred individual client/prospect inquiries or visits.
This [...]

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I’ve received various queries from people, particularly analyst relations folks at vendors, trying to understand what I cover, especially as it relates to cloud computing, so I figured I’d devote a blog post to explaining.
Gartner analysts do not really have “official coverage areas” defined by titles, and our coverage shifts dynamically based on client needs [...]

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