Tag Archives | MWD

Around Mark McGregor from MWD Advisors in 10 Questions

By admin on Wednesday 20th June 2012 in IIAR, IIAR Around In 10 Questions, IT Analysis Firms, MWD 0

Mark McGregor is Principal Analyst for MWD Advisor’s BPM programme with a Six Sigma Black Belt and certified PRINCE2 practitioner. He recently joined the company having previously worked for Bloor Research as Research Director. You can find out more about Mark via his twitter feed and on LinkedIn or alternatively read the latest from the MWD blog.

1. What are your coverage areas?

Given my 17 + years in the modeling tool market, it will come as no surprise that analysis & design will be a particular area of focus. I will also be looking more at some of the soft issues surrounding change and BPM in particular. As we say at MWD it is all about getting the best value from your IT investment, and that needs more than just technology skills.

2. What are your opinions of the IT Analysis Marketplace and where do you see it going? Continue Reading →

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Around Helena Schwenk from MWD in 10 questions

By Ludovic Leforestier on Wednesday 1st September 2010 in IIAR, IIAR Around In 10 Questions, IT Analysis Firms, MWD 0

Today we have the pleasure to welcome Helena Schwenk (bio, @hmschwenk, blog) who just joined MWD to lead the BI practice and where she reunited with some ex-colleagues. And she’s also a runner, so I’m looking forward to seeing her in races!

What are your coverage areas?
I cover Information Management (IM), BI and analytics at MWD. This is a huge area so in order to do it justice from a research coverage perspective I am honing in on the areas that I believe offer the most value to enterprises. This will involve looking at topics such as how advanced analytics can improve the speed to business insight and help create sustainable advantage, lowering BI implementation and development costs with Cloud, SaaS, open source BI and plug-and-play appliances, how to squeeze more value from existing IM and BI investments and how disruptive technologies for high performance BI, analytics and data warehousing can provide value. These topics will all form part of my IM and BI research agenda which we’ll be publishing shortly. Continue Reading →

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[JOB OPENING] MWD seeks an analyst

By Ludovic Leforestier on Monday 26th April 2010 in MWD 0

And today, some advertising for our friends from MWD who are hiring senior IT industry analysts to join them. For some background on the company, read Neil Ward-Dutton’s interview.

Coverage areas:

Information management (business intelligence/analytics, master data management, search, information lifecycle management, information integration); collaboration management (portals, messaging, unified communications, “groupware”, and emerging social computing environments); software delivery (application development, testing, dev/ops, application integration, SOA); or IT systems and service management (think ITIL plus some more business-focused management competencies).

Details here.

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Around Neil Ward-Dutton / MWD in 10 questions

By Ludovic Leforestier on Thursday 17th July 2008 in IIAR, IIAR Around In 10 Questions 1

This week, it is my pleasure to welcome one of the Neils of MWD Advisors.com, only shortly after he kindly participated at our last IIAR Forum: Neil Ward-Dutton. Those two ex-Ovum analyst have founded MWD in 2005, and this year have hired two more analysts and launched their first continuous advisory services. They also have a blog called On IT-business alignment, and related thing.

What are your coverage areas?
At MWD we organise ourselves around two things: “IT competency areas” (like process management, governance, software delivery, collaboration and so on) and “disruptive trends” (things like SOA, SaaS, virtualisation, Web 2.0, and so on). In our model, these form a matrix that we try and cover. As well as helping to run the company my main job at the moment is to run our research programme in the process management competency area, and also help to lead our work in SOA.
What are your opinions of the IT Analysis Marketplace and where do you see it going?
How long have you got? This is a question I’ve spent many hours debating (mainly in bars at conferences). There’s a lot of talk, amongst both our vendor and enterprise customers, about dissatisfaction with the inflexibility, high prices and complexity of dealing with the big firms. However they still have a huge amount of momentum in the market and massive mindshare, and that isn’t going to change significantly any time soon I don’t think. I like to think of them as “the furniture” – we can’t compete with them directly; they’ll always be there. They’re a bit like IBM and Microsoft in the enterprise software market. Still, though, we see a lot of opportunity for firms like MWD which are prepared to think differently and work really hard to deliver great customer service. I was recently asked about the outlook for MWD, given the uncertain economic conditions, at an IIAR round table event. My response, which I’ll stick by, is that the quality of our work and our pricing structure mean that we find there’s no shortage of business out there for us – our main challenge right now is finding the resources to go after it in the most effective way.
What’s your typical day like?
Long. But fun. The best days are spent working with customers face-to-face, helping them solve problems, or working through ideas with my teammates; the worst days are spent doing back-office stuff
How do you position your firm? What is your business model?
We’re an advisory firm focused on helping organisations align IT and business, and maximise the business value they get from their IT investments. Our starting point in everything we do is that focus. When we started the business we decided we needed to build a community and a footprint in the market: so we decided to give all our research reports away for free for the first 3 years. So until this year, all our revenue came from one-on-one consulting – with vendors and with enterprises. We’ve just launched two subscription advisory services, though, and these offer a layer of “value added” research reports and interactive decision support tools separately from our free “guest pass” research library. These are pitched primarily at European enterprises, but we’re also selling them to vendors.
What is your research methodology?
We use f2f and phone-based primary research with vendors (looking at capabilities, directions, SWOT etc) and enterprises (uncovering perceptions, challenges, maturity, etc). Some of our enterprise research in done in partnership with Freeform Dynamics.
Tell us about one good AR practice you’ve experienced or one good AR event you’ve atttended.
At a big analyst event last year, held at a swanky hotel, we had beautiful weather but most of the sessions were scheduled in a set of dark, windowless rooms in the basement. In one breakout, the session leader said “sod it, let’s go outside”. So rather than stand up and give a prepared death-by-Powerpoint talk, he took a group of us outside. We sat by the pool and had a great, informal round-table discussion. He was prepared to go off-piste, and I think that he (and the rest of us) got much more out of the session as a result.
What are your offerings and key deliverables?
As mentioned above our big focus right now is our new annual subscription advisory and research services (we currently offer one focused on BPM, and another focused on collaboration). These provide a mixture of vendor capability comparison tools, European best practice research and case studies, European market maturity research and enquiry time. They have “open licensing” terms that allow anyone in a customer organisation to access the research and (if the customer wants) place enquiries. In addition to these packaged products we offer custom enterprise consulting services (strategy reviews, procurement assistance, benchmarking and best practice workshops primarily) and vendor consulting services (quarterly strategy/messaging review retainers, competitive intelligence input, speaking at customer/partner events, and some very tightly-controlled creation of vendor-neutral thought leadership papers). We’re always developing new ideas, so check back regularly!
Any hobbies or favourite restaurant / food that you’d like to share?
When I’m not working or spending time with my son, I try to find time to play guitar, write songs, grow veg and cook for friends. I’m currently trying to persuade my wife that we can keep chickens. If I ever have a chunk of money that I can throw at something completely self-indulgent I’ll always aim to take my wife to a really good restaurant.
What is your biggest challenges for the upcoming 6 months? And for the next 30 mn?
For the next 6 months: continue to build our new advisory services business on a shoestring, so we can invest in some dedicated sales, marketing and customer service resources. For the next 30 min: finish some emails before my crappy laptop battery runs out…
Is there another analyst (a peer in your firm or with another firm) whose work you rate highly?
Well of course I think my MWD co-founder, Neil Macehiter, is a brilliant analyst and consultant. Without him we’d be all over the place. But outside MWD, I’ve also had the privilege of working with lots of great analysts. Dale Vile, Gary Barnett, Katy Ring, Jessica Figueras and Eric Woods (in no particular order) all spring to mind.