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What's
New
IT Budgets and the Current Economy:
At our upcoming “Wine and Tell”
event at the Westin in Bellevue on Feb 18th from 4.30 to 6pm,
we will be sharing data on the this topic based on the recent CIO Forum
moderated by our CEO, Al Nazarelli on the impact of the current economy
on IT priorities, Highlights of the data include:
· Which items are
being cut or downsized?
· Which items are
“sacred cows” and not likely to be cut?
· How customers
want their technology vendors to engage and interact with them in the
current climate?
We are also holding a wine tasting in
conjunction with this event. We have a few open seats left and if you are
interested or missed the original invitation that went out, please contact
Meadow Braly (meadowb@siliconvalleyrg.com).
Because we have designed this to be a
small group discussion to maximize interactivity and discussion, and we
only have a couple of openings, if we are unable to accommodate you, please
bear with us. We plan to hold an encore session in March on the same topic.
For our Silicon Valley and Bay Area client, we are planning to repeat this
event at the Capital Club in Downtown San Jose. If you are interested,
please contact Meadow Nichols (meadown@siliconvalleyrg.com) so we can determine attendance in advance for
San Jose.
New
Staff Announcement
Nancy Worthington has recently joined SVRG as Manager of Web Projects.
Reporting directly to our CEO, Al Nazarelli, Nancy will spearhead all our
web projects including the building of SVRG Communities, our
web-based online business decision making panel focusing on enterprise
decision makers and specialty audiences such as embedded engineers and
developers.
Nancy has a BSc from San Diego State
University in Computer Science and a BA from Humboldt State University in
Studio Art.
Nancy’s background represents a unique
blend of computer technology and web design and she has worked on
developing state of the art websites for both educational and internet
focused business.
Nancy relocated to the Seattle area
last year. She says, “I love all aspects of the
visual and performing arts, especially drawing, singing (solo and choral)
and printmaking. I once self-published my own comic books for print and the
Web. I love gourmet cooking and potlucks. My dream upon moving to Seattle
was to adopt a dog and to purchase a kayak, in that order.”
Please join us in welcoming Nancy to
our team.
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Al's Corner
The Importance of Domain
Expertise:
A recent survey of MR companies asked
company decision makers to indicate if they thought domain experience in an
industry sector was important to being an effective service provider to
that industry. The same question was then put to clients. A significantly
higher percentage of clients indicated that domain expertise in their
industry was important. In fact, an overwhelming 87% of you think so
SVRG has always deemed this to be a
very important factor in serving our clients. We have built our business on
serving the needs of the technology sector exclusively. And where we
have worked with clients in other industries, such as Financial Services
such as with Bank of America’s interactive division, we have worked on
projects related to deploying technology solutions to serving their
customers. Why is this important?
1. Insights and
implications: A common refrain we here from clients is it that they are
not just looking for data from their vendor, but insightful analysis
pinpointing how the findings can be used to solve business problems such as
revenue acceleration, mind share and market share increases sought. We are
“drowning in a sea of data” as one client recently expressed with
PowerPoint decks that go forever, a symptom of using staff without domain
expertise to conduct analysis.
2. Survey instrument
design: A vital component of successful project execution is
asking the right questions to begin with. Non-domain expert analysts rely
too much on the client to help frame the questions and are unable to be
consultative in this critical stage.
3. Peripheral
vision: Domain expertise enables the project team to be on the lookout
for items beyond the research agenda that may be important to the client. A
superficial understanding of the client’s technology will not enable the
project team to recognize these items or opportunities when they appear and
are likely to completely gloss over them.
4.
Error -free analysis and interpretation: Domain experience provides
significant advantage in developing acuity for recognizing when data points
do not make sense which may be due to an error versus merely reporting the
erroneous data point. We recently heard of a global study where the
contractor used multiple global vendors to complete the international data
collection. In one major geography, the data collection company hired
accidently transposed the name of the product being tested for awareness
and satisfaction for another product with a similar name from the same
client. Because the staff of the prime contractor did not have domain
expertise (and in fact themselves did not know the two products with
similar names were actually different products), they reported the data
even though the awareness and satisfaction numbers were unusually high for
the product and quite out of line with other reporting geographies,
Al Nazarelli is President & CEO of Silicon Valley
Research Group Inc. He divides his time between our San Jose and Seattle
offices and can be reached at aln@siliconvalleyrg.com
or 408-920-0361 ex 701.
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