Tuesday 19 September 2006

H&K on AR and compliance

Hill and Knowlton's ARcade blog is finally alive: Jay Andersen posted last week on the Borg AR call hosted by their vendor police:

In a nutshell, Gartner is trying to extend their reach into the financial community. They are not the first ones here, IDC is already considered as the reference for financial analysts and The 451 who was also selling research into the investment community bought Tier 1.

H&K is absolutely spot on when raising the China wall issue: until now, AR professionals could isolate The 451 and apply strict governance rules to IDC and Gartner/Dataquest for numbers disclosure. Gartner's foray into this market is problematic for vendors as the RAS analysts (those advising IT users) will exchange with those Financial Insights analysts -when they're not the same ones!

ARmadgeddon's bottom line: make sure that your spokespersons are properly trained on disclosure regulations (for instance they should avoid breaking down numbers by country or predicting future revenues, etc...) Provide guidance usign a consistent and centralised process.

PS: commenting on a previous post, a reader indicated us where Katy Ring went...

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