WeeklyJolt – Where is Gartners Coverage of Field Service
Welcome to this week’s edition of WeeklyJolt, the Jolt Consulting Group blog. We would like to thank those of you who participated in our advanced scheduling study that closed this past Friday, September 9, 2011. We had over 115 end-user participants from around the world and the insight obtained on the use and benefit of advanced scheduling technology was tremendous. We are busy synthesizing the results and will publish our findings by early October. Thank you to everyone who responded including Jim W, our 64th responder and Amazon gift card winner! Now onto this week’s topic — where’s Gartner’s coverage of field service?
A usual right of passage for field service software vendors that signals the end of winter and the dawn of spring is their participation in the annual Gartner magic quadrant for field service preparation process. A thick questionnaire, coupled with analyst briefings that must be completed for consideration in the magic quadrant typically raise the collective blood pressure of most field service software executives given the presumed weight the annual rankings carry in the marketplace. That is, until this year. For some reason, which we will speculate on momentarily, Gartner has not published the 2011 version of the field service magic quadrant. Gartner’s own website still shows a release in the April-June time frame of this year, but we are now in mid-September and nothing. So what happened? Why no magic quadrant this year?
I have a theory, but would love to hear your comments and views. Given the less than impressive performance of most software vendors in the space this year, I suspect the market is changing. The market pendulum again seems to be shifting away from vertically oriented field service software players and back towards horizontal technology plays. For example, mobility is no longer confined to field service, rather has become a horizontal initiative covering all field staff. The maturation of business process management (BPM) technologies is causing process optimization and re-engineering to be done across the enterprise, including within service operations. These trends appear to be adversely changing the relevance of field service only software vendors, thus hitting their bottom line. Perhaps Gartner is seeing this and feels its mobility, BPM, or CRM coverage is sufficient. The rationale is logical, but why not come out and state this is what’s happening and tell the world there will no longer be a field service magic quadrant? What about another, less than insight reason is to blame? Perhaps their recent acquisitions of AMR Research and Burton Group is pressuring their bottom line and the struggling field service software vendors aren’t providing enough fee revenue to justify the report. With pressure on the bottom line and lower than desired fee revenue, perhaps the report simply is a budget casualty. Perhaps the truth is somewhere in the middle, but either way 2011 Gartner Magic Quadrant on field service is no where to be found.
So this what’s your view? Email us your thoughts and ideas on what’s happened to the field service magic quadrant to info@joltconsultinggroup.com for your chance to win a $10 gift card from Amazon. The 14th person that provides us an their view will win. Please include your full name, company name, and email address to qualify for the prize. We will publish a few of the entries in our next blog post.
