Obviously when you’re starting a new company there needs to be an unmet need that you’re addressing, otherwise what’s the point? In our case, there were three things that we thought needed doing that other firms in the space weren’t really doing.
We span the intersection of all technologies, use cases and business practices. There are a lot of good technology analysts out there. But each has their own little niche and few really think in detail about the broader picture or necessarily the impact that their technology might have when deployed within an enterprise. The aim of Transforma Insights is to position ourself at the intersection of all our twelve technology families, with the use cases where they are applied, combined with the internal processes of organisations that are deploying them. It’s only with the holistic applied view of new technologies that enterprises can really sort the wheat from the chaff and make the key decisions. An analyst firm should be a horizon scanning function which is not limited by the specific technologies that happen to interest the analyst, or the direct implications of their associated disruption. Such an approach risks being blind-sided by unexpected new developments.
There is an unhealthy obsession in the analyst world with attempting to make the clients’ decisions for them. There is no way that an analyst can know an enterprise better than the employees. The best way to support them is to use the luxury that the analyst has to spend all day doing research to provide learnings from the wider market. Specifically this should be in the form of decision tools. There’s too much ‘I reckon’ in the analyst world of knowledgeable people speculating with only modest supporting information. At Transforma Insights we have implemented a much more rigorous approach to developing our recommendations based on comprehensive understanding of best practice in the sector. Rather than “I reckon you should do x” our approach is “based on your situation company y, here is the evidence about what approaches to z technology have worked, which haven’t, what provides the best return on investment and which vendors have the best reputation in that space.”
One of the key questions that analysts are asked is “who should I buy from?”. By compiling a comprehensive database of DX deployments we will be able to identify not only which vendors are active in a particular space, but which are the market leaders and which are associated with successful projects of a particular type and within specific geographies. Additionally we are providing vendors with the opportunity to present their capabilities to buyers.
We provide a reliable quantitative source for views on the size of the market across all of digital transformation. Forecast modelling has always been a strong point of the team and we want to apply some rigour and consistency to the entire of the Digital Transformation opportunity. All of the technology areas that we cover overlap. For instance you can’t think of Product Lifecycle Management without thinking about IoT, and autonomous vehicles make no sense without some form of machine learning. In that context to truly forecast the market opportunity for DX a holistic approach and a rigorous methodology are needed to gather the underlying data which gets down to the minutiae of who is selling what to whom and where.
Ambitious? Of course. But this is what’s needed by the industry.
