SPAR, not Spas, in Orlando

In a few days the AR community will be gathering in Orlando for Gartner's Symposium. Of course, all our colleagues think we have a week of pampered fun in our DisneyWorld resort. Sadly we are all too busy to take advantage of the hotel spa. Our only trip to the Magic Kingdom will be to bring back lost executives.

So while there's no spa time, there will be SPAR time. Those of us in the Valley who want to establish a society for professional analyst relations people are hoping to expand our support on our annual pilgrimage to the Atlantic. For those of you who haven't read earlier posts on this topic, the plan is NOT that we combine to pressurize the analyst houses. Instead, we want to network, develop professionally and promote analyst relations as a real profession. There's some flexibility: not only vendors, but also external service providers like freelancers and PR agencies and those who are in-between jobs.

Progress has been slow. Out of nine action items from the first SPAR meeting, nothing happened on most of them, because no-one had the time to volunteer: Everyone is really busy. The majority of us have corporate managers to deal with, and that limits our spare time. A few external service providers really have time and energy to support something like SPAR -- Tom, Bill, Duncan and Barbara -- but they are excluded for some rather spurious reasons (but they'll be hanging around at the edges, and Duncan is even flying over from London).

At Symposium we'll be seeing what progress has been made, and discussing how we can communicate outside meetings with blogs, online communities, LinkedIn, newsletters and so on -- especially because AR is a big global community, and not everyone can come to a central location.

In November, we'll have a meeting (probably at SAP) which will have a lot to review: charters, goals, structure, some common projects like a survey and directory -- and a series of how-to discussions on case studies. It's a busy agenda, so I remain a little unsure about whether we have enought support yet to make everything happen. However, it's certainly a move in the right direction.