Spend some time on Gartner's website; they are
still selling this report:

"Inventories and Schedules Key For Records Management
21 March 2003

Debra Logan

Inventories and retention schedules are vital for effective records
management and can prevent problems when facing regulators and court cases. Delete
unnecessary documents before they get you in trouble."

Keep in mind, lots of Gartner revenue comes from consulting - so the more
areas that they can appear to be experts, the more calls & leads the sales
staff gets.

Poke around the website a bit more, vendors represent about $300 million
in revenue to Gartner, out of $900 million and policy allows a single vendor
to account for as much as $27 million.

Is it not a bit analogous to political contributions?  If you are an IT player
and you buy yourself of a lot of Gartner time and buy a lot of space at
their trade shows are you not going to get a bit more attention in analyst's
reports than a competitor that does not?

When I was in IT we used Gartner, Dataquest (now part of Gartner) and
DataPro (also part of Gartner) for basic research and they had some
value.  That was pre-WWW days.  Most of the same information is now
just a Google away.

Rod Wallace
St. Louis, MO

List archives at http://lists.ufl.edu/archives/recmgmt-l.html
Contact [log in to unmask] for assistance