The IT Skeptic - Comments for "a back-of-an-envelope re-analysis of Forrester and BMC's own CMDB research"

IT's not science

avallesalas — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 10:23:22 +0000

I always try to remember my customers and colleages that IT is not science (at least not in the street... it is a science in the research labs and in the universities, but not outside, in the wild) so IT analysts dont' do science, they do business.

Even, it is interesting to read papers that are 10 or 20 years old where the same analysts defend a completely opposed point of view... it is a market and the needs must be created.

This is why nobody uses (for example) standard deviation in the SLA definitions :-)

Regards
Antonio

IT analysts don't do research

skeptic — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 23:51:47 +0000

you are right, it's not "research" as understood by the academic, scientific, or in fact general communities. IT analysts don't do research. But then IT analysts make words mean whatever they want them to mean. It's high time there were some sort of code of practice.

This isn't research

Alex Jones — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 14:13:58 +0000

There is a fundamental problem with work initiated by a vendor to determine the effectiveness of their product. They have a big incentive not to release the findings unless they are positive and they are unlikely to spend their cash on work if the results might not be useful. I wouldn't define this as research. It's PR and marketing. And this isn't a problem only found in the IT market. Research on new drugs is riven with difficulties. Evidence is fairly convincing that big pharmaceutical companies are subject to the same influences with similar effects. For example:-

"a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine dug out a list of all trials on SSRIs [Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors - a class of antidepressants] which had ever been registered with the Food and Drug Administration, and then went to look for those same trials in the academic literature. There were 37 studies which were assessed by the FDA as positive and, with a single exception, every one of those positive trials was written up, proudly, and published in full. But there were also 33 studies which had negative or iffy results and, of those, 22 were simply not published at all — they were buried — while 11 were written up and published in a way that portrayed them as having a positive outcome." This from Ben Goldacre's excellent blog http://www.badscience.net/?p=619.

I think that you and Mr Goldacre are tackling very similar phenomena but from very different perspectives.

drawing a long bow

skeptic — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 11:04:09 +0000

You'd be drawing a long bow to attribute customer retention directly and quantifiably to the introduction of a CMDB, but I wouldn't put it past this lot

Customer Retention

Rick — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 10:57:16 +0000