Don’t get me wrong, I think the IIAR “Analyst of the Year” survey was quite fun. We promoted it right here on the blog. But, good grief, folks are going a little overboard in reading into the survey that it signals some major shifts in the analyst industry.
The latest item about the IIAR survey that caused me to chuckle was the press release by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) touting “ESG Named One of World’s Top Ten Global Analyst Firms,” because it was ninth in the firm standing. Hurrah, we’re #9, we’re #9! Remember, only 116 AR professionals participated in the survey. So how many votes did ESG get to make it to ninth? Six or seven? If I saw this in a vendor analyst briefing presentation I would tell them to delete it, because it is the type of silly hype that would be red meat to analysts, like at ESG.
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Just curious – should the survey remain just a bit of fun, or would you advocate something more formal, and indeed global? I’m conscious of the fact that the IIAR was started in Europe, though I don’t know what effect that might have had on respondents to this survey.
I think it would be best just to keep it at the fun level. To make it anywhere near statistically valid would entail a huge amount of work. We can get into a really boring discussion on why this type of survey is problematic, but that is not germane.
The real question is what is the purpose of such a survey? I cannot imagine any AR manager using the survey results to impact the rankings of their analysts list because it does not touch on relevance or influence. Is a buyer of analyst contracts going to base any purchasing decisions in any significant way on the results of such a survey? Bottom line, why put a lot of work in to something that other than bragging rights would not have a practical use?