Gartner: Top 10 'Anti-Resolutions' For 2009

Gartner VP Jeffrey Mann has compiled an intriguing list of his Top 10 "anti-resolutions" for 2009 that he either (a) wants someone else to do or (b) wants others to stop doing. It's a thought-provoking list, particularly about how some IT vendors tend to treat their customers.While Mann's list is influenced by his focus areas of collaboration, team workspaces, Web conferencing, and knowledge management, it's applicable across most sectors of the IT space. Below, I've picked three of his 10 anti-resolutions to elaborate upon. You can find his complete list here.

P.S. -- One other reason I liked Mann's blog was his honesty in describing his profession: "The main one is that these are not things that I intend to do, but stuff that I hope that other people will do. I find that a lot easier. It's also generally what analysts do; we rarely do stuff, but we comment a lot on what others should do."

Maybe IT vendors can help customers here by taking a page from Major League Baseball's use of statistics: want to know how many times a certain player has hit into double-plays during night games in July played on grass fields in innings 4 through 7? MLB can spit out those numbers, along with tons of others either more or less meaningful. To Mann's point, I'll bet a lot of business customers would like to have a software vendor share some usage stats on the 10,000 available features in an application: how many of those are actually used by a meaningful percentage of customers? And over time in customer environments, which features become core parts of the business process, and which ones have their usage fall to zero because they add no value? That could be a lot more interesting than the tit-for-tat silliness Mann describes. And who knows -- maybe that tracking of customer-oriented stats could be a new business for Gartner?

Following the important theme raised in his first point, Mann calls out a huge issue when he says that "Too many vendors still consider their job is done when the software is delivered, at least until they have to convince the customer to upgrade to the next version." It's become increasingly clear that buyers of almost any type of product value the experience they derive from their engagement with the product more than just the thing itself, and nowhere is this more true than with enterprise software. With budgets tight and many customers beginning to question the entrenched revenue models software companies have used for many years, now seems like an ideal time for software companies to take this cause to heart.

I'm not sure how widespread that divide-and-conquer approach is these days -- it seems like something that would have been very effective some years back when organizational silos and technological silos and process silos were all still flourishing. And while many still exist, their numbers are dwindling and the ones that remain are standing out more starkly as massive impediments to progress and success. So if any software vendors and/or their salespeople are continuing this devious process, I say the only appropriate treatment for them is to be horsewhipped -- publicly, if possible.

And if that seems too harsh, then those charlatans should be forced to attend the 100 hours of conflict-resolution classes set up by the HR team to stop the warring between the internal departments that the software companies have intensified. (For myself, I'd take the horsewhipping.)