This Month's Spectrum Summary:

(The following is an excerpt from the July 2007 issue of Spectrum, a proprietary monthly briefing published exclusively for the clients of I.T. Strategies, Inc. © 2007)

Mission Impossible:
Accurately Predicting the Future-
Data Is Valuable, but the "Story" Is What Really Counts

To celebrate the completion of this year's annual I.T. Strategies wide format printing forecast, we meet this month with two consultants who have participated in this program for all fifteen years of its life, Marco Boer and Patti Williams.

To open, they agree the job has been difficult but rewarding. When they began the program back in 1992 the market was quite small. But it was clear that inkjet technology would be driving an impressive explosion. As a new wide format (WF) submarket, inkjet had no trend line, so judgments were made by surveying potential sites and applications.

Micro-trends are tough to forecast, especially beyond one or two years. Macro-trends, such as a dotcom bust and boom or the 9/11 terrorist attack that stalled the market, are much less predictable. Still more challenging is the explosion of input data as a market is distilled into narrow sub-segments. This year's report is built on about 20,000 pieces of input (regions of the world, paper types, inks, etc., etc.). The main user categories are print-for-pay and in-house/corporate. Users of the forecast tend to want more and more detail. The detail can be helpful to given users, but the down side is that a few off-target numbers can distort the overall picture.

Unlike most analysts, Marco and Patti dare to look back and study the accuracy of past forecasts. One discrepancy was the misjudgment as to when the inevitable in-house inkjet WF market would take off. For the print-for-pay sector, the forecast was fairly accurate. Later on there was distortion because most digital photography users went for 17-inch width machines, and these were not in our WF definition at the time. In both cases, however, the "story" was accurate in that inkjet was destined to drive accelerated WF market growth.

Because useful market forecasts rely heavily on judgments as well as data, continuity is important. Marco reminds us that they have been tracking wide format longer than anyone else. And that thanks to the I.T. Strategies "brand strength," they succeed in talking with almost everybody within the industry and a wide assortment of users.

In short, with this year's 151-page document you have a map. Users can go through it and pick out the detail that is useful to them. Beyond this is translating the data to the big picture, translating numbers to words. And each user can take the numbers relevant to them and translate that back into their own words, to come up with what they believe.