The unreasonablemen posted over here about analysts, and whether they hold much relevance in these days of citizen journalism. It’s a good post and got me thinking.

UM state that in their situation;

I personally rely more on the blogging community than the annual, out of date documents put out by these places now.

But then ads that;

The only thing lacking (and I mean no disrespect) is the credibility that these houses have, it is very hard to know if numbers put up by [the bloggers] are accurate

And therein lies the paradox. The analysis houses lack the real world breadth of vision to say it like it really is, while the citizen analysts lack the credibility of the big boys.

The answer as I see it will be for the big analysts to embrace a new model, one where meta specialists provide data on their key speciality – the analysis houses will become aggregators and proving houses for analysis rather than hotbeds of analysis itself.

What we’ll see is a Wikinomics type collaborative model being put to an analysis situation. It’ll provide more timely, more accurate and more relevant analysis – and that’s a very good thing.