I think this is a direction you guys could very easily evolve in. Of course you are thinking about this as analysts and your background is in reporting and analysis of strategies. But where you guys differ from conventional analysts is because you have a hunger to make sense of the context – of how society is changing, how its relationship with technology is changing, how systems, software architecture, project management, sales, etc etc reinvent themselves. That’s something everyone needs help on. In my opinion Gartner, Forrester, etc just don’t really get that stuff… and when they try to, they run it like a research project where objectives are defined 12 months ahead and then studious researchers go out and measure things. That’s what MIT’s Tom Malone (in ‘The Future of Work’ – a great book) would term a ‘command and control’ approach to analysis. You are part of his new breed – those who ‘coordinate and cultivate’.

Maybe much of what you do is about supporting the (re)design process. I got the chance to spend a few hours talking recently with Sam Lucente, HP’s design boss. Sam was passionate about trying to drive a regime of simplicity throughout his “14bn dollar model shop”. He argued to me that nothing now from people like Google and the others would be possible without the really big, complex, back end systems work that was done in the 1990s by the likes of Cisco, IBM and Netscape to name a few. It was about connecting really complex stuff into really great, really simple things. You guys help each side connect with the other – the creators of the big, complex back end stuff need new ways to sell that shake away the 1970s-hangover IT sales channel.

We are now entering a different time. I started my career in ICL’s sales training division of 1991. Full of suits learning to sell expensive software to people employed to buy it. But the most exciting part of the equation doesn’t work like that today. Those who are creating stuff need to start with the ideas and then build a flexible ecosystem around them – a shared vision with partners, a process to evaluate, select and integrate technologies and a strategy along the way to build awareness and to launch the thing (or not if you’ve done your job really well). But that’s not done by people off Accenture’s management training programmes – it’s done by people who understand that stuff evolves – it doesn’t get created in a plan on day one with three years implementation. Developing a brief is a problematic experience in almost every conceivable situation. What you describe as Redmonk’s strength in ‘social networking’ acts as a way of helping people evolve their brief, through observation, engagement, networking and the testing of ideas.

This isn’t systems integration – there’s more art in it than that (and I always say the best inventors are artists who trained as engineers).

If I was IBM or Sun or whoever, I’d want to be reaching the people designing the new really simple, but clever, stuff. They want to be selling to those people. And you find those people way better than they can.

Disclaimer: Sam Lucente is a client. And you and I are friends / business cohorts.

Oh and glad you liked the latest Re*move blog