Why Technology Analysts Need to Lead with Business Value
Duncan Chapple
Analyst Relations lead for Elisa Industriq & Elisa Polystar @ SageCircle | Analyst Observatory co-director @ Edinburgh University
After back-to-back briefings with analysts here at Mobile World Congress, I'm hearing that many analysts find themselves caught in a familiar tension: focus on the technical facts or emphasize business outcomes? As someone who has worked with technology analysts for decades, I've observed that many resist making bold business benefit statements for fear of sounding like vendor marketing. Yet, the very stakeholders they aim to influence—technology buyers—increasingly need exactly this connection to justify their investments.
The Analyst's Dilemma
Industry analysts excel at evaluating technologies. They can dissect architectures, assess performance metrics, and evaluate technical capabilities with impressive precision. When advising technology buyers, the natural tendency is to focus on these technical merits:
This technical focus comes from a place of integrity. Analysts are rightfully concerned about making business claims that sound like "marketing fluff" without sufficient evidence. They prefer to stay in the realm of verifiable technical facts.
But here's the challenge: technology buyers don't make decisions based on technical merit alone.
The Evolving Technology Buying Process
Today's technology purchasing decisions are rarely made solely by technical specialists. Even when they are, these specialists must justify their recommendations up the chain to business stakeholders who ask a fundamentally different set of questions:
When analysts focus exclusively on technical capabilities without connecting them to business outcomes, they create a translation burden for the technology buyers they aim to help. These buyers must then make the business case themselves, often without analysts' unique industry-wide perspective.
Moving from Technical Assessment to Business Value Without Losing Credibility
The solution isn't to abandon technical rigor—it's to connect that rigor to business impact in a credible way. Here's how analysts can make this shift:
1. Lead with evidence-based business outcomes
Instead of seeing business benefit statements as marketing territory, analysts should frame them as evidence-based conclusions derived from their research:
For example, rather than simply stating, "This platform has superior API management capabilities," an analyst could say: "Organizations implementing this platform's API management capabilities reduced integration costs by an average of 23% across 15 case studies we examined, primarily through reducing development time and maintenance overhead."
2. Structure research around use cases, not just features
Use cases naturally bridge the gap between technical capabilities and business outcomes. They provide context that explains not just what the technology does, but why it matters in specific business scenarios.
By organizing research around use cases, analysts can maintain technical depth while making it immediately relevant to business priorities.
3. Acknowledge the full decision-making context
Technology decisions are made in complex organizational contexts with multiple stakeholders, competing priorities, and existing constraints. When analysts acknowledge this reality, their research becomes more actionable.
This means discussing not just which technology is best in an abstract sense, but which approaches are most likely to succeed given typical organizational challenges, skill availability, and change management considerations.
Why This Matters More Than Ever
The gap between technical capabilities and business outcomes has real consequences:
By bridging this gap, analysts don't compromise their integrity—they enhance their impact.
A Path Forward
The most influential analysts today aren't those who make the most technically precise assessments in isolation. They're those who can confidently connect technical capabilities to business outcomes with evidence and insight.
This isn't about adopting marketing language. It's about recognizing that the ultimate measure of technology isn't what it can do—it's what it can enable organizations to achieve.
When analysts lead with business value and support it with technical evidence, rather than the reverse, they don't diminish their credibility. They amplify it by demonstrating a deeper understanding of why technology matters in the first place.
And in doing so, they better fulfill their core mission: helping organizations make technology decisions that drive meaningful business results.
Duncan Chapple is a leading authority on analyst relations and technology industry influence. He helps industrial software providers understand and leverage industry analyst insight while helping analysts increase the impact of their research.
Duncan often the tension comes from hesitating to tell the truth. Business outcomes often take more than just a specific vendor solution. They often require a combination of solutions and business process change, reimagination etc.
Lead - Global Analyst & Advisor Relations and Public Relations | Post Graduate Diploma
1 周I agree with you. I have often heard teams saying, "What the analyst suggested makes sense technically, but we don’t see immediate demand from customers. While it’s a good recommendation from a technical standpoint, we’re unsure if it presents a strong business case."
Global CTO & Founder @ Sageable | Digital Transformation Advisor
1 周+ ??!! Was talking with some analyst colleagues today about this. #AI coverage seems completely misdirected at 'finding a use case for AI' instead of 'using AI to fix a problem'. Most analyst coverage I am seeing is completely backwards. Tho I suspect vendor capture is at least as much to blame as management direction.
Begun work on my 2nd book. This one is focused on insurance and cyber. 1st book: “Stone Tablets to Satellites: The Continual Intimate but Awkward Relationship Between the Insurance Industry and Technology".
1 周Researching, analyzing, and writing about innovative technologies (whatever they are) is certainly fun ... but truly meaningless unless an analyst can discuss what the impact and implications those technologies have or could have on company operations (and decision-making).