It was 1997. I was an intern in the Secretary of Commerce’s office and was asked to write bullet points about the Internet that would promote administration policies to foster the ecommerce economy. I clearly remember including IT market size and impact estimates from Gartner and Forrester in the talking points. While there were many freely available reports from academia and NGOs, I still coveted the full copy of the reports that were only available to the aforementioned analyst firms’ clients.
A lot has changed in the last 18 years, yet Gartner and Forrester along with IDC are still the leading providers of IT market research in the United States. Still, behind the seeming stability there has been a seismic shift – the abundance of free information has reduced businesses’ willingness to pay for the same types of research they used to.
While I can’t promise that the entire industry will be disrupted, there are definitely opportunities to provide new services associated with content marketing, expert networks and peer evangelism. In future posts I will describe some of the opportunities in the research IT research and advisory business.