Toby Bell

Toby Bell
Former Research VP
8 years at Gartner
25 years IT industry

Toby Bell is a former vice president in Gartner Research, responsible for a range of document and content management technologies for the High Performance Workplace group. Some key areas of coverage include vendors and trends in the enterprise content management (ECM) marketplace… Read Full Bio

Clay Shirky

by Toby Bell | March 2, 2011

Later in March, I will be in Los Angeles for Gartner’s Portals, Content & Collaboration (& Social Media, & Mobile, & Context) Summit. You should be, too. As conference chair, I do a number of things to help promote the event – but haven’t mentioned it here. Given all the topics I’ve covered in posts, […]

CMIS 1.0 May Be 3.0 Years Too Late

by Toby Bell | January 13, 2011

It might be hard to determine given evidence of other interests in my blog, but my primary research coverage at Gartner is focused on enterprise content management. For those of you not interested in this (and you outnumber those that do by a nearly immeasurable factor) I will keep the technical micro-humdrummery surrounding standards to […]

Xmas @ Beezid

by Toby Bell | September 1, 2010

RIVER CITY, IA Grandma (as I now call her) dropped by the house yesterday. She’d lost her life savings and was distraught. I was not unmoved, but was also aware of the fact that such a loss is less significant when said savings amount to “what’s left in the social security deposit this month.” It […]

SharePoint Overwhelms Business Intelligence (repost from May 2008)

by Toby Bell | March 14, 2010

SharePoint overwhelms business intelligence as a top search term on Gartner.com, that is. On Google, the SharePoint yield back in May, 2008 was 19,600,000. Today, the number is 15,100,000 (I wonder if Google’s competitive instincts have infected its algorithm). What caused something to finally overtake BI among Gartner’s clients? A number of factors, not the […]

Dear Toyota: (Managing Reputation in Real Time)

by Toby Bell | February 11, 2010

Google, Scoopler, and other search tools now deliver real time results (and partly by this I mean anonymous consumer opinions) from social media utilities like Twitter and Facebook and blend them with those sourced from the Web at large. There’s no indication of the relative merit of these opinions (nor is there any scoring of […]

Crowdsourcing Contract Negotiations

by Toby Bell | January 28, 2010

The emergence of social spending analysis has enterprise implications – even if you’re not a retailer. Blippy, the first service provider in the space, delivers a live feed of purchase data from registered users’ credit cards. It also provides segmented data for specific retailers, though not in depth. For example, as of the moment I […]

“It’s Elementary, My Dear Watson”

by Toby Bell | January 11, 2010

When business leaders think of advances in computing, they might remember the images of the early Cray Supercomputers and what came next: Then… … and Now In short, they remember a futuristic machine seemingly able to manipulate the curvature of space/time evolving into something that now more resembles a space heater. The same happened with […]

Idiocracy: We Have Been Warned

by Toby Bell | August 24, 2009

“The true course of every human journey that is set by money instead of by stars or better counsel is to meander inevitably toward misery.” This might be a real quote, albeit by a relatively wordy poor person. It’s more likely that it is a logline – perhaps one from a Greek tragedy written centuries […]

Win ‘Em, Wring ‘Em, and Wean ‘Em

by Toby Bell | May 7, 2009

No – it’s not the name of a law firm. It’s a business model. The concept behind this is that seatholders represent the lasting value toward enterprise software vendor stability – that gathering and then holding onto as many of those end-users as possible will keep one vendor afloat on a stable sea of maintenance […]

“Dammit Jim, I’m a doctor not a bricklayer!”

by Toby Bell | April 6, 2009

Doctors don’t want to be rated by users of Angie’s List and I don’t blame them. Hear me out, as I’m sure it appears at first blush that I’m much more sympathetic to doctors than I really am. Of course, maybe it’s because I still have lingering pain in the backs of my knees and […]

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