Whit Andrews

A member of the Gartner Blog Network

Whit Andrews
VP Distinguished Analyst
10 years at Gartner
14 years IT industry

Whit Andrews is a vice president and distinguished analyst in Gartner Research. Mr. Andrews covers information access technologies, including enterprise search, and maintains the information access technology Magic Quadrant with Rita Knox. He is also a significant contributor to e-discovery… .Read Full Bio

Coverage Areas:

About scenarios and RFPs

by Whit Andrews  |  October 22, 2008  |  Comments Off

This was a comment response to Dan’s comment to my below post — I think it’s worth being it’s own post, too.

The scenario model is perfect appealing — obviously, the more optional elements that one can introduce into such a model, the better off one is. The more I think about this kind of thing, the more I think we get back to rules of triples. We have:

the variable: What is asked about what can be done.

the input — the degree to which a vendor says it can or cannot do the variable.

the calculation of value that the enterprise places on the value input into the variable.

The place to start, I think, is to give a list of variables, and allow vendors to input what they believe into those variables, and then allow enterprises to set a value on those variables via calculation. Only then can I do better at what you describe — expanding or contracting the variable list based on a scenario, setting different degree dimensions based on the scenario, and allowing (or encouraging) enterprises to vary the values based on the scenario.

There’s something wooly in there that’s not right. I’m going to go back after I finish this model.

Oh, and also, for any of you gagging at my stupidity, providing a 0 value to the enterprise for its Likert scale was idiotic. I yanked it — the enterprise gets 1-3, and deletes the functions it doesn’t care about. Otherwise the vendor is penalized and gets a worse score for every way the enterprise simplifies the RFP. Duh.

Comments Off

Category: Uncategorized     Tags: