How we did it

Through a phone survey conducted by Research Concepts in Berlin, Mass., we asked 250 readers to rate company and CEO power, using a scale of 1 to 100, with 100 being the most power. We then compared this year’s mean – dubbed the Power Rating – with last year’s. From this we calculated the percentage of change in a company’s, or individual’s, year-over-year Power Rating. The purpose was to measure network vendor and CEO power in the eyes of the user community (see story).

We surveyed readers from a variety of industries, with the finance, government, healthcare services and manufacturing sectors providing some 60% of participants. The remainder came from seven other industries, including aerospace and utilities. All readers held IT titles in the network field and worked at companies with more than 1,000 employees, half for organizations that employed 10,000 or more people. (See demographics.)

This year, we reduced the number of vendors and CEO survey subjects from 25 to 20. We felt this change better reflects those who are watch-ed as industry benchmarks of power. However, this change did affect the ranks of the companies and CEOs in the 2002 results, particularly those who landed below a rank of 10. For that reason, we have not attributed a shift in rank from 2001 to 2002 to a relative shift in power.