So now that you know what an ombudsman is, I'll introduce the people behind the titles. Larry Perlstein and I are co-ombudsmen at Gartner. Larry is an eight-year Gartner veteran, much of that time as a research analyst and later as a research manager. He has 25 years of IT industry experience - with IBM, General Electric and others. Me? I've been at Gartner for more than 20 years and have been a research analyst, created our rigorous "analyst boot camp" training program and ran our publishing operation, among other things. I've been here for so long that if I don't know the answer to a question, you can bet I'll know where to find it.

There are two of us because so many issues are not "black and white," and it's often valuable to talk through an issue with someone who also deals with them every day. You'll hear from us about once a week in this blog. Stay tuned.

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I'm sure you've been asked this already, but you really need to add an RSS feed to your blog(s). Many readers use some form of RSS reader to collect all the content from the many blogs we might track. It is a pain to have to actually visit a site to read your blog entries.

The ombudsman idea is excellent. It is a much more effective means of communications with Gartner, especially as a vendor. Years ago, when challenges or differences arose, they went up the food chain (I remember an escalated issue going to the founder in 1988!). I am not sure this is efficient or productive. So the ombudsman office is a great step and the blog even better. Very nice.

Good luck to both Nancy and Larry as you undertake this challenge.

One question I had; I just finished the book 'Freakonomics' and a discussion on behavior and incentives are core to the book.

How are the Gartner analysts incented? Is there a divide between consulting and publishing (especially when covering vendors?) How are potential 'conflicts' like these handled or disclosed to readers and customers? (These seem inevitable and similar to the Big 5 conflicts between consulting and accounting that we witnessed in the last several years).

Thanks

In response to Roger's question about RSS ... Here's the link to the RSS feed. http://blog.gartner.com/blo...

For those of you who are not RSS-saavy: RSS = Really Simple Syndication. It is a way to aggregate content from multiple sources into a single website or application where it all can be viewed. For example, I use My Yahoo! to aggregate all the blogs I read so that I don't have to go each individual site. Hopefully soon we will have an RSS button on the blog to simplify the process, but for now just use the URL.