Gartner (work in progress…)

I had a Gartner subscription for one year. I also got to interact with their Product Development group. They are definitely working hard to enhance the experience of their clients as they access and manage their Gartner “assets” (documents, analyst calls, conferences, peer-to-peer exchanges, client partner calls, webinars,…).

Since, in one year, I went through the entire life-cycle with Gartner, I would like to share some thoughts on their service.

The interactions I had with Gartner were work related. So, anything I do in that regard, I would want my colleagues to be able to see. In particular I would like to be able to annotate documents (or webinars), share them, and of course see what others have said on those documents.

I envision a platform (that could sit on top of Office 365 for instance) that would play in the collaboration eco-system of “channels”. A channel is a topic (Innovation for instance; like HGTV for housing in the TV world) that brings people together. People post to it; external sources can be made to also post it. Of course this offering could be accessible as a SaaS offering. Ideally such a platform would also be able to aggregate different sources of information (Forrester, Harvard Business Review,…).

So the Gartner subscription would be based on the platform provided to a company, not individuals (even though employees of the same company) subscribing to the same service multiple times. Gartner does not address the knowledge sharing aspects that is so critical to companies now days.

As a matter of fact, anything (especially if it has knowledge attached to it) that can be sold multiple times to a company , through employees of that company, should be approached as a platform enabling collaboration.

Last but not least, off-boarding was terrible! I was not given an opportunity to back up the documents I had saved to my “library”. Nor the posts to my peer-to-peer networks. I was not given notification of what was about to happen. All knowledge I had accumulated and relied upon was gone. Even my trusted client partner did not warn me!