Analyst Reports on ECM Don’t Tell The Whole Story – Why You Should Research What’s Not Said

February 8, 2007 Blog No Comments

In Analyst Reports on ECM Don’t Tell The Whole Story – Why You Should Research What’s Not Said, Astoria Software blogger Chip Gettinger starts off his post by pointing to a recent Forrester Wave report that started a heated discussion among some content management professionals. Their gripe? The Forrester report—and subsequently, several reports from other analyst firms—fail to address the granular content challenges many organizations are attempting to tackle when they make the move to content management.

Specifically, Gettinger writes about the need for analysts to better understand why organizations want to manage content at the component level. “The oversight in not including component content management in the Forrester report,” Gettinger says, “is in the fact that content management strategy and solution evaluation should be relevant to the requirements of the end deliverable and its application – i.e. how, and for what purpose will the the information be consumed?”

“What’s troubling to me is that too many analyst reports fail to focus on the final purpose of the content or the content components that are to be managed,” Gettinger writes. “Assumptions are made that do not fit business requirements. It’s difficult to talk about software tools and applications when the true purpose or ‘use scenario’ is not identified. Analyst reports can focus too much on technology trends and not enough on the actual application for that information.”

So what useful information can be found within an analyst report? Getting says that “the best analyst reports include information about actual customer deployments – providing comparisons of what was planned and their actual results. Additionally, user satisfaction results by similar companies provide realistic insights on objectives, and results of the solutions implemented.”