My point was, and still is, that attractive blogs from Forrester analysts draw eyeballs, and the company can leverage, and should therefore encourage, ways to use them. Boundaries are entirely appropriate, and deep content people pay for ought to be exclusive for them.That’s a no-brainer. But blogs are the new advertising for anyone in the IP business. Why turn down the opportunity?

Btw, (i) do analyst permitted to inform the audience of the post they made or (ii) even copied the post (w disclaimer that its taken fr official blog) on their current blog?

Cheers,
Rizky Priyono

There’s no surprise that the only comments coming from inside of Forrester are supporting this move. Who would dare speak-out against this overly-controlling management team?!?

Where I, and probably a lot of other former and current employees, would take issue is that Forrester has always sold itself as a people focused company that does things differently. This and many other decision seems to fly in the face of that image. To understand the turmoil within Forrester around this issue, and many others three things need to be taken into account:

1) The goal to beat Gartner. Anybody who has worked at Forrester knows the huge emphasis that execs place on beating Gartner. Strangely, over time the obsession to beat Gartner has created a drive to become more like Gartner (or at least how Gartner is characterized within Forrester). Forrester always prided itself for being an entrepreneurial; think outside the box type of company – Gartner the opposite, corporate and impersonal. The ongoing transformation seeks to turn Forrester into an efficient business machine. More processes, more message control, more discipline, and more focus on the bottom line. Less personal innovation, less interest in retaining employees long term, and less originality. The new blogging policy reflects this transformation and is a further step towards turning employees into replaceable cogs in a highly optimized revenue-driving machine. Don’t confuse this machine with one designed to make satisfied customers or happy employees.

2) The process dogma. At some point, the management at Forrester decided that processes were a great thing. Processes apparently always led to quantifiable and consistent results, whether you were building a car, designing a computer program, writing a report, or even thinking of an idea! Recognizing the massive potential of processes, the management set about trying to create a process for every conceivable business function. Let there be no doubt that Forrester execs passed many a sleepless night over how to build a process around blogging – a creative, spontaneous, and personal activity that did not lend itself well to the confines of a process. Luckily, someone came up with the original idea to just make blogs more like existing Forrester reports (i.e. hosted on the Forrester website, sent through Forrester editing and publishing, ability to modify or delete when necessary, etc.). Forrester’s new blogging policy needs to be viewed in the light of a company that truly believes that the best way to run a business is through the strict confines of a myriad of processes and rules.

3) Entrenched management with tired ideas. Analysts and sales people seem to have relatively short careers of between 3-4 years at Forrester, contrasted with the executive team who seem to have become some form of corporate aristocracy appointed to positions for life. The only major changes were when a number of execs were forced to resign over an options scandal back in 2006! Regardless, over the years these execs have had some good ideas evidenced by the Forrester’s success, but as time has gone on they seem to have run out of ideas. That’s problematic for them since the company is intent on constant transformation. The result? Unoriginal and risk averse thinking, leading to poorly thought out processes/policies, tons of needless bureaucracy and infighting, and perhaps most sadly of all a continued lack of any type of inspiring corporate strategy beyond profit generation.

So what does this all add up to? The result is very far from a black or white situation, but a quick look can easily determine two camps of winners and losers:

Winners: Forrester Inc. shareholders, executive management team

Losers: Forrester analysts

The most important question of which camp customers will fall remains up in the air. Forrester remains a great brand, full of smart and dynamic employees. The danger of course is that decisions like this and adherence to the prevailing process dogma will drive away more of the best and brightest (for example Li, Wang, Owyang, and many, many others), which will ultimately erode the company’s strength. Unfortunately, up until the stock ticker starts to go down, no one in the Forrester management team will ever admit or acknowledge any such problem – something that certainly does not bode well for a customer.

http://blogs.forrester.com/marketing/2010/02/forrester-wants-more-analysts-using-social-tools.html

Your employer has the power to edit, modify, re-attribute, delete, distort and do anything they want with your words/pictures/videos on their site. They can choose to ruin your reputation or bury your online presence as if you were never at the firm. If your employer closes shop or is dissolved following a merger, your work can vanish along with the reputation you’d earned.

This not about Forrester concentrating its brand. It’s about your power over your fate. It’s you controlling how you are perceived in the marketplace of ideas, over the longevity of your online presence, of your ability to promptly respond to comments, to speak in your own voice, the authority to revise and correct posts.

Our worldwide knowledge work labor market requires a well run, living, professional online presence. Like a gap in your CV, Forrester’s policy shuts down your professional onlife.

I’d like to think that analysts would consider the overall opportunity to do cutting-edge research and work with top-notch colleagues and clients, rather than basing their decisions on what effectively is a requirement as to whose server an analyst’s blog is hosted on. Note per Josh’s post/comment above that individual analysts currently do and will have the ability to have “their own” blogs. For analysts who want to blog, this policy seems totally accomodating to me, and will still allow individual analysts to “build their brand” with their own blog.

Cheers,
Gerry