Craig Roth
Managing Vice President: Communication, Collaboration, and Content
4 years at Gartner
25 years IT industry
Craig Roth is a vice president and service director for Gartner Research, in Burton Group's Collaboration and Content Strategies service. Mr. Roth covers a wide range of knowledge and Web-related topics at the intersection of collaboration, content… Read Full Bio
by Craig Roth | January 26, 2012 | 1 Comment
In my posting How a Collaboration Technology Gets Adopted I described a storyline of how a collaboration technology goes from purchasing through adoption (and beyond to value). That technology could be social networking, SharePoint, an intranet, or a portal – I’ve seen the same pattern with all of them. There are 3 paths for what could happen: “adoption”, “spotty adoption”, and “non-adoption” (see red highlight in pic below). If the technology is getting used everywhere, great! If it’s a failure, ditch it. But it’s that middle one – spotty adoption – that’s so difficult to deal with. Why is it tricky?
First, it’s easy to miss the fact that adoption is spotty. It takes some research to tell you that there are black holes on the org chart that rarely use it and then interviewing to find out why. Aggregate usage stats or packed monthly community meetings won’t tell you.
Second, the technology can look like a raging success since the areas where it’s happily used speak louder than those where it’s absent. Spotty adoption means you do have real fans, departments that have totally adopted it, and several real anecdotes where it has provided hard value. And the areas of the business, roles, or processes that haven’t adopted it aren’t complaining – they just silently go about their business without the technology. But anecdotal success doesn’t equal real success. Only by a more thorough canvassing of the business can the technology owner determine which parts of the organization could derive the most value from the technology and then compare where it’s being used against that list.
Third, it’s tough to know what to do if it is spotty. Is it worth the extra effort to do a more formal push like training, an awareness campaign, or door-to-door evangelism? Are there some enhancements required to pull in the additional audience and what will they cost? Quite often, the spotty usage and anecdotal success is just enough to justify staying on the current path. It is difficult to make the argument that mediocre success is not good enough and to double down on the investment. It’s easier to coast along and hope that the next, ballyhooed release of the software energizes those non-adopters for you. Don’t count on vendors to solve your adoption problems.
In summary, it’s great that you’ve rolled a collaboration technology out and it’s proven it can add value to some real fans. But, as I wrote in my posting on Getting to the Second Value Tier for SharePoint, getting to the second tier of value requires a different approach that puts the focus back on prioritization instead of just rolling it out and being happy with whoever shows up to use it.
Category: Collaboration Microsoft SharePoint Portals Tags:
by Craig Roth | January 25, 2012 | Submit a Comment
Adoption, adoption, adoption. Sometimes it seems like that’s all anyone wants to hear about when it comes to collaborative technologies such as social networking, SharePoint, Jive, or intranets. I’m on record as being a bit of a curmudgeon about adoption since I’ve seen it abused so frequently (particularly in the SharePoint space) by IT folks that don’t want to actually talk to the business about what they need and co-own the solution. I’ve written about this before in ’Driving adoption’ is a band aid for poor demand management, Outside In Strategy for SharePoint (or Rethinking the Need to “Drive Adoption”), and (for a laugh) my review of the SharePoint evangelism videos.
Still, lack of adoption is certainly a symptom (not the cause) of a failing collaboration initiative and worth investigation. There are many possible reasons that adoption can be spotty or non-existent. This point was driven home recently in a get-together my team had to review what participants of our social and collaboration field research told us. As we analyzed the results, I could see a common thread across disparate topics (RFPs, governance, training) that could be connected to tell a story about how a collaboration technology gets adopted based on the real-life stories of our study participants.
So I whipped out a sheet of jumbo scratch paper and draw the following diagram to show how they connect up:
OK, so I’m no artist. But if you look at the enlarged image, it shows all the steps that happen on the way to adoption and how many places the study participants had stories about how it went wrong.
- Product selection: A technology may start with a formal product selection step, such as through the purchasing department or an RFP.
- End user decision to use: But purchasing and licensing have little to do with whether a technology will be used. There are several options for how a user will decide to use a technology, influenced by where they are on the governance spectrum, from formal standards to guidance to users bringing it in from home without IT even involved.
- Promotion: Regardless of the route that end users take to deciding (or being compelled) to use the technology, there were many stories about how people knew what to do with it and when to use it. These ranged from event-style rollouts to formal training to more informal mentoring approaches.
- Adoption: All this led to either lots of adoption, failure (usually lost momentum), or a limbo state where there is spotty adoption and a decision needs to be made whether to take another go at increasing usage or just accept where it’s at.
- Resurrection: Technologies don’t really die if not adopted – they may just lie dormant and be re-introduced in a few years when the technology improves, is reborn under a catchier name, or people that were preventing it move out of the way.
- Value: As I said above, the ultimate goal shouldn’t be adoption (except through the narrow lens of a technology owner getting reviewed on “success”) – it should be the value it provides to the business. There were too few participants that discussed value in our unguided interviews.
We’ll be writing and publishing more on the results of this major field research project soon, with lots more detail on all these areas and what we think you should do about them. I just wanted to share the picture and a high level view that I found interesting (and hope you do too!).
Category: Collaboration Microsoft SharePoint Social software governance Tags:
by Craig Roth | December 29, 2011 | Comments Off
To expose a popular old post of mine to a new audience (and out of sheer laziness) I’m repeating this post from 2007. Enjoy and happy new year!
Well, it’s that time of the year when the top 10 lists take over the front pages. Those of you who read this blog regularly (yes, both of you) know that I tend to focus on communication, collaboration, and content technology and, sure enough, I’ll be bringing this all around to that at the end.
A quick scan shows that Time magazine published 50 (fifty!) top 10 lists here: 50 Top 10 Lists of 2007. Hmmm – that’s just a categorized top 500 list, isn’t it? I don’t have time to get through that much – let me know if they publish a “top 10 ’top 10 lists’ ” and I’ll take a look. Wired’s homepage has The Top 10 Heartbreaking Gadgets of 2007, The 10 Best Gadget Ads of 2007, and Top 10 Scientific Breakthroughs of 2007. Perhaps the best of all is The Onion’s What the Hell Just Happened?
I think there are two kinds of readers who enjoy these lists. The first is people that follow the subject in question and want to see how the author’s list (supposedly some kind of expert) jibes with theirs to validate their views, give them something to gripe about, or point out a few things they may have missed. Movie buffs love to see the “top 10 films of the year” list to see if they should brag to their friends about their good taste or slam the critic as obviously out of touch.
I want to focus on the second kind of reader that doesn’t follow this subject and likes the top 10 lists because it provides a year’s worth of news in a handy capsule. For these readers the top 10 list acts as a filter to all the noise that occurs during the year. If you are stuck in with kids all day and don’t get out to the movies, the list is a handy way to fill up your Netflix queue for next year (after a 6 month lag or so for the DVD to come out).
Now, wouldn’t it be handy if, rather than once a year, that filter was always in place? I could subscribe to this filter and instruct it to alert me only when a top-10-worthy film, or classical CD, or news story comes out? And to remove the noise by not bothering me with the lesser films, CDs, or news in the meantime? It’s hard to guess what will exactly equal 10 by the end of the year, but I’d accept say 15-25 items and a dial to increase or decrease the sensitivity if I’m getting too many/few each year.
I’m bringing this up because I see the “top 10 list” phenomenon as a good analogy to what a slew of technologies at the intersection of portals, RSS, and social software are trying to do: filter out all the noise and just bring me the important information, encapsulated, all in one handy spot. It is a commonly recognizable form of attention management.
The process for assembling this is the same whether it’s Time coming up with a top 10 list, a blogger filtering news to find just the important stuff worth posting about, or the rules engine for an enterprise attention management system that is trying to find important events and pull them forward into the user’s focus. The process consists of:
Integration: Connecting up with all the event streams, information sources, and data
Categorization: Determining what subject the event falls into
Rating: Prioritizing this bit of news. This is probably the toughest part of the process at the moment, but attempts have been made in the form of social ratings engines (Digg) and attention profiling (APML).
Personalization: Lining up the category against the set of subjects that you are personally interested in, either through explicit declaration or implicitly.
Display: A UI that presents the user with capsules on each of the items and allows the user to notice, track, and manage the information
This process is even more important in the enterprise, where the stakes are higher than missing a good opera CD. How do you create your own “competitive news critic”, “financial event critic”, or “sales critic” to pick the most important information for you and how do they encapsulate this information and display it for you? It could be the head of each of these departments flagging important news and alerting others to it (hopefully not just through email). It could be through social ratings of important events. It could be through automated alerting mechanisms that work off of triggers or rules. No matter how it’s done, having an enterprise Roger Ebert to pick the best (and worst) as it happens and a good display channel (like Roger Ebert’s newspaper column) to present the information is as useful in a noisy enterprise environment as it is in a noisy entertainment environment.
With everyone focusing on top 10 lists, I’m hoping this “angle” helps an evangelist for RSS, portals, social software, or attention management to make their case in a way that will resonate with business partners and executives during the New Year’s season.
Happy New Year!
Category: Attention Management Fun Tags:
by Craig Roth | December 15, 2011 | Comments Off
Seeing some of the new games out for the holidays this year has reminded me of what a high quality user experience really is. “Gamification” has been the hot meme lately, referring to the use of game mechanics to non-game applications. Usually those game mechanics include capabilities like scoring, badges, leveling, and so on. But I think there’s a more subtle aspect that underlies it all: high quality user experience. What about thinking of “gamification” as making interfaces that are as polished, responsive, attractive, and intuitive as a game?
I was a game designer and developer in the late 1980’s before moving into corporate IT and remember an exchange that pointed out the difference in UI mindset between the gaming and IT worlds. I was on the user interface design committee at a credit card company, hammering out UI standards for colors, menus, button naming, etc. One day there was a dispute – I think it was about what the hotkey should be for menu items that begin with the same letter. I described a workable potential solution. But another committee member, known for being the senior programmer on the high-profile call center app (and for being a smart alek), disagreed.
“Where did you get that idea? From a computer game?” he sneered and others in the room began to chuckle.
“As a matter of fact, yes.” I said to some more giggles. “But you know, people used to pay ME to use my programs. We have to pay THEM to use yours.” The room went silent and it’s the only time I remember that guy not being able to find a comeback.
My point still stands today. Corporate IT gets away with terrible design because it can – the users are prisoners to the app. When the user can just stand up and walk away with no adverse consequences – as they can with a game – a higher level of usability and design is required. And except for a few optional apps (like social networks or collaboration sites), an IT developers’ success will be judged on checking off capabilities, not how many users it accumulates. In gaming I was paid on “net sales” – copies sold that were not returned within the grace period.
Some apps have a blend of required and optional functionality where this dynamic plays out. Consider a tracking or knowledge management system where employees are required to close out a record for each transaction, but have a wide range of latitude in whether to fill in the minimum amount of data necessary to close it out versus providing more metadata, longer descriptions, or more accurate data. With a poor UI, the organization will capture much less useful information than with a better one that made it easier and less stressful to provide enhanced information about the transaction.
I don’t want everything in my corporate apps whizzing around the screen or playing like a first-person shooter. Come to think of it, I don’t want anything from my IT department whizzing or playing like a FPS! But I would welcome a change in development mindset that suspends the belief that users must use your app and consider how user experience would change if you had to please users as well as grant them capabilities.
Category: Gaming and Virtual Worlds Tags:
by Craig Roth | December 8, 2011 | Comments Off
I am happy to see that French tech company Atos is banning the use of e-mail between employees. Where’s my popcorn? I can’t wait to sit back and watch this one to see what happens. Will the evil spammers and time wasters finally get driven away from the Gotham City that is the modern corporate e-mail inbox? Or will the superhero (former French finance minister and Atos CEO Thierry Breton) find that even superhuman efforts aren’t enough to win this hero-driven crusade? It will probably be more like a good French movie: interesting, exploring a universal theme, and helps us learn a bit about ourselves.
If it works out well, then great – we all learned something. If it doesn’t (which is more likely in my view), then I’ll be glad it wasn’t my company or a client that I advise. Because I would not advise this.
Each tool has its plusses and minuses, leaving one playing whack-a-mole when trying to beat down one technology only to see an increase in the negatives of the alternative. Whack the e-mail mole because 90% of it is junk, and you may find new garbage popping up in your IM channels or social wall postings.
E-mail also happens to occupy a certain spot on the attention management continuum - the degree to which that channel grabs the recipient’s attention. It’s really the only tool that occupies that exact spot, so you will necessarily find messages shifting to be more noticeable (IM’s that pop up on the screen rather than waiting patiently in your inbox) or less noticeable (messages posted to a discussion group that a key recipient might not think to check) than desired.
In any case, it’s easy to shoot holes in the concept. Since this was announced at the end of November, a gaggle of journalists, bloggers, and analysts have acknowledged the sentiment while bashing the implementation. To me, it’s a grand experiment that tests theories of modern communication and will be fascinating to watch. My biggest disappointment won’t come from failure or success – it will be if they lose momentum on the way to their 18 month zero-e-mail goal and creep back to normal e-mail usage. Then we’ll never know what a 74,000 employee company without e-mail looks like in the modern age.
Category: Attention Management Communication Tags:
by Craig Roth | November 4, 2011 | Comments Off
I will admit to being a bit of a curmudgeon on popular press articles about information overload, workplace interruptions, and the like. Experience has taught me that when I see a headline about one of those topics, I can expect any number of “information overload 101” fallacies.
Not so with Katherine Boehret’s article in the November 1st Wall St. Journal “Focus! No Willpower Required”. It describes programs for helping computer users to avoid distractions. Her article deftly avoids all the pitfalls I normally see in this type of article.
First, it correctly describes these as distractions and a concentration rather than interruptions:
Sitting at a computer and trying to concentrate can be nearly impossible between incoming email alerts, ever-changing Twitter feeds, new instant message notifications and Facebook lurking a click away in the browser.
There is a war on workplace interruptions that often depends on sloppy, one-sided math and broadening the definition to munge interruptions and distractions. Interruptions are external to the user; distractions are internal (you do it to yourself).
The reason that distinction matters is that the causes and solutions are different. For distractions, self-control and methods for increasing awareness or holding things off are the solution. Much like dieting. For interruptions, there is a complex set of social contracts, technological capabilities, cultural expectations, and workstyles that belie a simplistic solution such as unplugging the network cable.
Second, the article acknowledges that self-control aids differ by person:
“Not everyone will respond the same way to the same distraction-proofing program, but using these types of programs could be the first step toward feeling more productive and in control of your work time.”
And third, she cleverly uses the word “feeling” instead of “being” more productive and in control. There is an illusory and unmeasurable aspect to this (unlike what your scale says when dieting). It’s possible the distractions actually keep your stress down or free your creative mind, or they could just be procrastination. It depends on the person. But the kind of people that try these programs are the kind that want to feel productive and in control and the programs help you feel that way. I have various techniques I use to avoid distractions as well – everyone needs a little think time now and then.
Category: Attention Management Tags:
by Craig Roth | November 1, 2011 | 1 Comment
I’ll admit that I’m not as interested by what’s in a productivity vision as the change in that vision from year-to-year and what is left out. I recently compared the “Microsoft Real time collaboration future vision 2010” to the “Productivity Future Vision 2009”. It seems the 2009 video was from Microsoft Labs and 2010 is from the Office group.
As far as changes in vision, my comments from the 2009 Productivity Future Vision video still apply. Especially the snarky comments: there are still no old or fat people in the future, people find holding razor thin sheets of glass comfortable, and workers just manipulate content rather than create it. Furthermore, it’s now clear that future productivity technology is only for the rich and privileged who live in Japanese-design-influenced environments that are perfectly clean and lit with no need for personal artifacts, food, or trash cans.
Let’s add two mobile future visions into the mix to triangulate further: the Nokia Future Technologies video from their research center and a school project of the IIT Institute of Design sponsored by Samsung. The Nokia video shows gaze tracking eyewear in action. The Samsung-sponsored video shows devices communicating with each other. So they both add some nice device-based ideas to the mix. And they both confirm a Logan’s Run future where productivity is driven by workers’ knowledge they will be exterminated when they hit 45 years old (up from 30 in the movie!).
Behind my smarty pants comments are some real issues. I can understand if these don’t fit the medium of the future vision video, but I think they are important and should be addressed by thought leaders:
Are emerging countries left out of the productivity future vision, or is that a rich world conceit?
Everything in the videos is in English – the standard language of Westernized business, but a barrier for productivity workers in emerging economies. What about a vision that includes quick contextual translation or localization? And the devices and work styles fit well into large, clean environments with expensive tools. What about a vision for environments that are chaotic, less insulated from temperature and elements, smaller, and more hazardous to expensive and fragile sheets of plastic? Or that doesn’t require every user to have their own, expensive, perfectly maintained personal devices? Maybe the innovation will be in identity so that scores of people can use fixed devices with easy-to-use authentication and security rather than new devices to be passed out up to the 7 billionth person on the planet. Or more flexible sheets that can be rolled up, crumpled, and dropped. In summary, by not having a vision that leverages the productivity of the billions of people in emerging economies for the businesses that could their brainpower, these productivity future visions provide only incremental rather than exponential improvements in overall performance.
Is the productivity future vision just for the young?
There is no doubt that the young are the future, but there is still value in extending the usefulness of employees into old age as productivity workers rather than the lucky few that get to spend their golden years as executives. Many trends (aging boomers, rising incomes in emerging economies, better healthcare technology) are contributing to an extension of the productive working life of people. They may be a bit less mobile and need devices that are easier to read. This is where I like the Nokia vision of the glasses (can they also do vision correction?).
Will future form factor be a simple extrapolation of Apple designs?
I may be alone here, but I don’t think hard, flat, thin glass/plastic is the ergonomic ideal. It looks great and currently confers status, but doesn’t hold and manipulate well. At some point, as with any design, something else can emerge as the ideal and we’ll look at flat glass as dated. What else is there? Beats me – maybe glasses (better accommodates older workers), maybe micro projectors, maybe floppy color e-ink pages (better for messy, bumpy environments since they are less breakable), maybe non-personal fixed devices with simple authentication that pulls info from the cloud instead of each person needing to supply their own device (better accommodates emerging economies and poorer workers).
I hope that future videos of this nature start to incorporate societal and cultural trends in addition to extrapolating on technology trends. That may lead to a better future rather than just a more productive one.
Category: Fun Tags:
by Craig Roth | October 31, 2011 | Comments Off
“I want SharePoint”. “We need content management”. “We want to buy product xyz”. Business folks can be pretty demanding and specific in their requests from IT. Hey, if the business says they need something who are we to question them? A client of mine recently had a deluge of these requests with few specifics about why the request was important. They needed to impress on the business the importance of providing enough information to build a good business case for the investment. A proper demand management process requires a conversation with the business and IT to take place for several reasons:
- Prioritization. Demand vastly outstrips supply, so without a good understanding of the pain points and how they are disrupting business, the project can’t be properly prioritized.
- Determining net benefit. Without understanding more about what the project will do, IT can’t estimate the benefits and may not be able to estimate the costs. Both of those go into the net benefit which is needed to make a decision.
- Verifying if there might be a better alternative. It’s IT’s job to know all sorts of technologies to pick from, so there may actually be a better option for solving the business problem. It could be another technology or maybe even just a process fix, but IT can’t tell if the original request is too vague.
- BS detector. Let’s face it – airline magazine syndrome hits even bright executives. Part of IT’s job is to act as a good steward of the IT budget and make sure there are good reasons beyond a competitor using it or it sounding cool. (By the way, it was recently pointed out to me that the proverbial “airline magazines” never write about this kind of stuff – it’s just a phrase that means reading a short, glowing summary in a popularly accessible form).
- The need for a business case that can be carried through build and metrics. The more detail is given around why the technology is needed, the more ability there will be to pre-empt piddly questions as the app is being built since IT will be able to infer direction from their knowledge of the goals. And when it comes to measurements, they will be much easier when a good business case states its expectations in detail.
- Governance. IT needs to make sure the requestor actually has the authority to ask. Perhaps security or marketing requirements prevent the request once its usage is known. Or perhaps higher level signoff is needed.
Each request seems important and clear to the requestor, but when seen in the context of all the requests IT receives it hopefully makes sense that a deeper conversation needs to take place.
Category: Organization Tags:
by Craig Roth | October 24, 2011 | Comments Off
I don’t often dabble in personal attention management since that field is quite crowded and lends itself to discipline and time management tips. But Lifehacker just published a good list called “Top 10 Tricks for Dealing With Email Overload”.
I especially like #5-10: 10. Get to Know Your Email Client, 9. Learn Your Email Values, 8. Filter Priority Messages, 7. Don’t Check It Too Often, 6. Respond In a Timely Manner, 5. Keep It Under Control When You’re On Vacation. The others are more of a personal taste, so hopefully these aren’t in priority order. In fact, I’d prioritize them in reverse order with #10 (“Get to Know Your Email Client”) being the first I’d focus on.
Technology can’t solve information overload, but it can help one manage it. If only their link to Outlook tips was working (grrrr…).
Category: Attention Management Tags:
by Craig Roth | October 19, 2011 | Comments Off
Yesterday I presented “The Joy of Information Abundance (Why Information Overload Is Wrong) “ at Gartner Symposium in Orlando. As part of the “maverick” track I tried to make sure it was fun and challenging, with topics such as the three worst information overload quotes, a 2-minute information overload presentation, Monday morning to-dos, and a comparison of the ancient library of Alexandria to the 2002 rebuilt one.
I think it went well, although attendees seemed to prefer asking questions privately afterwards rather than in the Q&A session. Too bad, since there were some good private questions that I think many people had on their minds and would like to hear the answer to. They were:
Is this related to “context-aware computing”? Yes, indeed. Gartner has done ground breaking work on Context-Aware Computing and enterprise attention management (EAM) dovetails nicely into it. EAM helps expand the context-aware computing research that has mostly been focused on consumer application (“increasing revenue and profits” according to “Context-Aware Computing: Clear Strategies and Best Practices Emerge”). EAM is internally focused on increasing response time, decision quality, and productivity of information workers (if it helps them feel a bit less stressed too, that’s even better!). While these are different targets, it’s all about context. Another related term is “situational awareness” which is used frequently in military and government (there’s a great definition here that fits what I’m trying to do with EAM quite nicely).
I soft-pedaled the role of culture change in this presentation. Why? Maybe I’m overcompensating for all the information overload material I’ve seen that places too much faith in the ability of clumsy etiquette and habit advice to make a lasting difference by changing culture. Clearly culture change is important, but it is a long term effort (10-20 years) that results from consistent application of smaller, short-term steps. I’m not a culture change expert, but I believe that you can’t directly change culture – those levers aren’t exposed for someone to maneuver. You can only change its course slowly through indirect means, which is tricky business. To increase my success rate and immediate relevance, I’ve focused on things that can actually be done today with technology and process that, over time, could influence the habits of information workers in an organization.
How do I get the attention of others for an important message? I admitted that I’ve considered the art of getting the attention of others to be the Dark Side of the EAM force. I spend my time researching how to help receivers of content find the information that’s best and ignore the rest. To also help senders of information to blast their message through to those receivers feels like helping both sides of an arms race! Granted there are legitimate reasons to help senders get messages through, but for now I’ll focus on the other side of the issue so I’m not tempted by the advertising folks.
Category: Attention Management Information work Symposium Tags:
