About CITO Research

CITOResearch.com is a hybrid news and analyst offering. The news will come from stories we write a based on interviews with practitioners and other experts. The analysis will come from creating white papers, research reports, and books, also based on interviews for the most part.

The site will also be a playful take on the world of technology including humorous and satirical content as well as profiles of interesting technologists. Dan Woods will also have his blog on the site, extending the writing he has done in his Forbes.com JargonSpy column to a larger audience and to more deeply technical topics.

The model will differ from existing technology-focused sites in four ways:

Focus on practitioners

Most trade publications primarily rely on vendors for content. This makes sense because vendors are eager to participate in the content creation process and provide a lot of ready made content and access to experts. So, when you read publications like InfoWord, The Register.com, TechCrunch, and CIO Magazine, you find that technology is the star of the show.

CITOResearch.com will focus on the challenges facing CIOs and CTOs as they struggle to make IT work for the business. CITO is a combination of CIO, the role that managers the portfolio, CTO, the role that creates and integrates solutions, and IT, the application of technology to business. The stories will cover the problems found in the lives of CITOs, not just technologyproblems but the challenges of organizational change, of managing up, of managing down, and of charting a course forward in your career. Of course, we will write about technology, but we will do so within the context that CITOs start from, not a clean slate that most vendor communication assumes.

Focus on the Middle Game of Technology

Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm model of technology adoption has four segments: The innovators/early adopter, the early majority, the latemajority, and the pragmatists. Moore's insight in his first book is that each of these segments look for different softs of information. Moore pointed out that the innovator/early adopter segment is highly skilled and very confident of its ability to adopt technology. This segment is primarily interested in a description of the functionality of the technology. Because the explanations of the functionality of a technology start from a clean slate and does not cover the context, we compare communication to this segment to the opening in a chess game.

At the other end of the adoption model are the extremely risk averse pragmatists, who are only interested in applying well-understood and low-risk technology to well understood, common business contexts. The kind of communication that appeals to the pragmatist are success stories. We compare this sort of communication to the end game in chess. The idea is to take a well understood situation to victory.

The middle is occupied by the early majority and late majority. The early majority is risk averse, but is willing to adopt a new technology if it has a strong business impact. The late majority is more risk averse than the early majority but is also focused on the business results of the technology. But business results are rarely describable in the abstract, the context of an industry or of a business specialty such as the CFO or other roles must be explained, and then the way that the technology makes a difference must be explained. In other words, the story is at least as much about the business situation as it is about the technology. In Moore's analysis, he calls each way that a technology is applied to a specific business context a bowling pin. The chasm is between the innovator/early adopter and the majority. We compare this kind of communication to the middle game in chess, a complex, highly situational part of the game that is hard to generalize about.

Our goal at CITO Research is to focus on the middle game. We want to tell detailed stories of the entire context in which technology is applied. By doing this, people will see what when right and what went wrong, not just with the technology but with the change management, the communications strategy, the budgeting and tracking and so on. At almost every conference on technology, the most attended sessions are those at which customers tell the story of their experience using technology. We want to tell those stories at CITO Research.

Even those these stories are highly specific to a certain context and industry, attentive practitioners will be able to take valuable lessons away that they can apply in their own context.

Use of Problem Statements

The standard journalistic model is that reporters and editors come up with ideas for stories and then write them. If a story resonates and attracts traffic and attention, more is written in followup stories. Even when volunteer reporters are added to the mix, this is still the model. In other words, there is no testing to determine what the audience is interested in.

Agile development methods recommend that you should be suspicious of the quality of your requirements when creating software. Agile methods are focused on doing the smallest amount of work to get software in operations so you can confirm
that the requirements are correct. Then you continue to build the software in smaller iterations, confirming your requirements along the way and making adjustments when you find out you were wrong.

CITO Research will apply the same idea to content using problem statements. A problem statement is a description of a problem facing CITOs that would be addressed in some sort of research. The problem statement will explain the general nature of the problem, the benefit to the CITO of solving that problem, and the questions that would be answered in the research. At the end of the problem statement would be a list of related stories and a discussion forum.

The readers of CITO Research will express their interest in a problem statement by either signing up to track the problem statement or to participate in the research. If the problem statement gains sufficient interest, then the research
described will be performed. Problem statements can be sponsored by vendors or by CITO Research.

Depending on the topic, the problem statements can be very focused ("How can BI users be empowered to create their own demand forecasts for CP industry?") or very general ("How is social media transforming business processes?").

When people express interest, CITO Research may reach out to them to perform interviews to write stories that address some questions in the problem statement.

When a problem statement has been researched and content has been created the problem statement is considered complete. The content may be downloaded by CITO Research readers as part of a content syndication process.

Redesign of Lead Generation Process

Problem statements will be used to redesign the lead generation process by allowing ideas for content to be tested with the intended audience. In a typical enagement, CITO Research will charge a fee to allow a vendor to explore a specific area through several problem statements. The problem statements will be posted on the site and the sponsorship will be indicated.

If CITOs decide to track or participate in a sponsored problem statement then the sponsor would get the emails of the CITOs, just like in a content syndication process. If a problem statement became popular and the sponsor decided to pursue the research, then the sponsor would fund the research and CITO Research would work with the CITOs who expressed interest and with the sponsor to create the content.

Once the content was created, it could be syndicated through CITO Research or other channels.

In this way, lead generation and thought leadership content could be created in an agile way that would result in better ideas that were tested with the audience. In addition, the process of creating the content would result in leads being generated and engagement with prospects.

Use of Perspectives

The stories and problems statements on CITOResearch.com will be written with a usage perspective in mind. Some software is intended for the individual. Other software only makes sense in a team context. Other software is for a large organization with thousands of people. Too often, software is discussed without sufficient attention to the perspectives involved in its usage. We aim to make the perspective clear in all our writing.