# Methodology

> How Futurum produces what it publishes: the hybrid method, the five assessment areas, what feeds a score, and where the open line falls.

- Canonical: https://trial.futurumgroup.com/methodology/
- Published: 2026-09-10

How the research gets made Futurum Research covers eleven practice areas with qualitative and quantitative assessment of technology solutions, business issues, market drivers and end-user demand dynamics. Each area publishes a market model, a decision-maker study and a coverage taxonomy, so a client can see the boundaries of what is covered before they buy rather than after. The method behind the vendor evaluation work is hybrid. Agents do the scanning and the drafting. Futurum analysts define the market and hold editorial control. In between sit two guardrails aimed at one specific failure mode — a fluent, confident sentence about the wrong vendor. The five assessment areas Futurum Signal scores technology vendors across five analyst-weighted assessment areas: Strategic Vision Go-to-market Execution Ecosystem Alignment Product Innovation & Solution Capabilities Business Values Index Weightings are set per market by the analyst who owns it. A composite score is useful; the sub-scores are where an argument actually happens. What feeds a score A curated corpus of proprietary Futurum research, accessed through GraphRAG, plus ETR (a Futurum company) and G2 partner data, plus public sources. The combination of confidential and public inputs is what closes the visibility gap that public-only analysis leaves open. Two guardrails sit on opposite sides of the drafting step. Upstream, a sovereign context graph — a deterministic local graph of established vendor products, capabilities and axioms — is queried before any semantic search, which anchors every agent inside absolute vendor boundaries and prevents cross-vendor conflation. Downstream, an adversarial fact-checking courtroom audits every drafted finding line by line: a prose prosecutor challenges qualitative claims, a grounding researcher verifies data points against live sources, and a policy judge applies edits. Only then does a Futurum analyst review it. Measured, and modelled A Signal position is scored . Futurum Signal is a continuously updated vendor evaluation that scores technology vendors across five analyst-weighted assessment areas, refreshing when a market does something substantive rather than on an annual publishing cycle. It re-scores on demand, when a market shift warrants it — an acquisition, a launch that changes a category boundary, a go-to-market change — rather than on a fixed calendar. An ROI Spectrum figure is modelled . The Futurum ROI Spectrum is an independent, third-party research methodology that quantifies the return on investment of a technology or professional-services offering — both the value existing customers have realised and the value a prospective buyer can credibly expect — using a proprietary matrix that models thousands of scenarios rather than producing a single composite number. At the core of every study sits the Spectrum Matrix: a proprietary modelling framework that runs thousands of scenarios across seven real-world factors to model two outcomes for every business impact a study measures. Inclusion, and what is free to read Inclusion is set by analyst-defined criteria for each market, not by participation. Vendors and clients can request briefings to understand a score and surface context, and the framework, weightings and assessment areas are published so a score can be interrogated. Everything published is free to read, quote and cite, with attribution and the canonical URL. There is a verify_quote tool for exactly that reason. In a market of synthesised answers, provenance is the product. The published corpus — insights, research reports, press releases, analyst and company records — is open. Market models, decision-maker survey data, Signal scores and ETR series are subscription content. Where to go next Futurum Signal — the vendor evaluation model, its assessment areas and its FAQ. Futurum ROI Spectrum — the Spectrum Matrix, and the five categories of business impact a study measures. The coverage taxonomy — what a practice area is, the eleven of them, and the filter code for each. For agents — the machine-readable surfaces, and how to cite this research.