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 | February 8, 2012 | 3 Comments
I’ve had a handful of clients ask me about the same use case: we need something to maintain a high level view of how a whole slew of projects are doing. There’s no standard project management software or approach being used, so this just has to be superimposed on the existing chaotic and inconsistent processes used by each project owner (I hesitate to say “project manager” as that implies more formality than there usually is in these cases).
They need something light, free (their budget doesn’t take a hit), and collaborative. We’re talking simple streamlining and improvement here, not a wholesale process change. Basically, someone with a higher level interest in all the activities wants a place to go to see how everything is progressing. And if something goes off the rails, they’d like to be proactively notified.
This sounds like one of those use cases that’s ripe for IT-assisted end user computing. It’s simpler than case-specific software, but needs a little help from IT to make generalized end-user software work.
The typical approach is to do this via email or maybe a spreadsheet. There are whole categories of software for project management and Project and Portfolio Management software, but those are much larger in cost and learning curve than the non-PMO folks asking me are looking for. But the clients I talk to have outgrown the email or document approach and want something a little better.
There are several options as I see it:
- Collaborative list: Custom lists (like those in SharePoint) are a straightfoward approach to allow the project owners to update their own list items with status, % complete, tag them with categories. You can attach documents if needed. And they usually provide for auto-notification through RSS or email when rows change.
- Collaborative spreadsheet: There are several cloud-based spreadsheets (e.g., Google Apps, Zoho, Smartsheet even has Gantt charts) that allow for collaborative editing without having to email an actual file around or worry about changes being overwritten. An enterprise-level one (security, de-provisioning if users leave the company, backup, etc.) is strongly preferable to just using free consumer services of course. The ability to enter long-form descriptions and attach file is more limited, but spreadsheets require no training.
- Wiki: The idea here is to create a kind of “living status report”. Type up the status report once as if you were creating a Word document summarizing how all the projects or tasks are going. But do it in a wiki and open it up for editing so it can now be kept continually up to date instead of having to create new versions each week/month with the date appended to the filename.
- Blog: If more of a newsletter approach than a status report is appealing, blogs can be used by all the project owners to post entries when milestones are hit and tag them with the different projects, organizational units, team members, topics, skills, or whatever you like. The entries are articles, like in a newspaper, talking about what has happened on the project and offering a sense of completion and praise for a job well done. RSS readers allow interested parties to subscribe to the blog as a whole, or specific tags within it based on their interests.
- Social networking: If an internal social network is being used, such as IBM Connections, project managers can just post updates when milestones are hit and tag them for future concatenation into status reports.
There are probably more as well as more creative options become available. These options generally forfeit the regular filing of a status report form that can be mined in case something goes wrong. But how often do you really go through the old status reports? These options usually have logging of changes that can help somewhat for auditing purposes, but would be difficult to use in a large environment. What you gain instead is a single version of truth and collaborative entry that avoids any concatenation or summarizing effort.
Are there any other ideas you’ve used?
Category: Collaboration Strategic Planning Tags:
by Craig Roth | February 7, 2012 | 3 Comments
Have you gotten any emails with this Email charter attached that points to “10 Rules to Reverse the Email Spiral”?
I’ve seen a few examples, but the “email charter” is one of the better and more organized attempts I’ve seen. Unfortunately, these email etiquette screeds suffer from the problem that they focus on email.
I’m convinced that you can’t solve email overload by just addressing email. Email is just one part of the overall information workplace that consists of many communication and collaboration mechanisms (technical and non-technical). If doing certain things in email is a no-no, then where should you do them. Here are examples from the email charter and my response:
- “Quash Open-Ended Questions”: Fine, then what is the appropriate time, method, process to ask open ended questions?
- “Give these Gifts: EOM NNTR”: Maybe there’s a better technology for sending short messages? There’s several, including one actually named “short message service”!
- “Slash Surplus cc’s”: Agreed, but what do I do when I want to let lots of people know I’m fully open to informing them and acknowledge that any one of them may be very interested in what’s going on?
- “Tighten the Thread”: OK, this one is on the right path. It mentions the etiquette breach(“it’s rare that a thread should extend to more than 3 emails”) and then suggests an alternative (channel switching to a phone call instead).
This advice usually lacks an understanding of the need even if you don’t like the medium with which it was addressed. Yes, sometimes people want others involved in determining the point or action items rather than encapsulating it up top in the first sentence. Sometimes people need to communicate very short messages. Sometimes they want to have unstructured, open ended discussions. Sometimes they want to let a large group of people know they are included and can be informed if desired. Sometimes they want to quickly deliver a multi-megabyte presentation to a group of people Just telling peers that these make for annoying emails and to “stop it” is not productive.
Face it: these different conversational needs exist and if email isn’t the right way to do them, then the right answer isn’t to lengthen, shorten, reword, and re-address the message to shoehorn it into your ideal email. The right answer is to treat the message need as valid and describe what other channel should be used instead.
If you’re trying to give advice to information workers, rather than an email etiquette primer, spend that time instead advising them to log into their IM tool every morning and keep the presence status up to date, making use of discussion forums for long conversations, using wikis and document libraries instead of attachments, using blogging or social networking to keep people informed without long cc lists.
Moreover, recognize that every organization has a different mix of culture, behavior patterns, information needs, and technology. I’d rather see advice that helps organizations craft their own responses to their information environment (like my attention management conceptual architecture) rather than a stock set of rules that can’t possibly take an organization’s expectations, needs, and capabilities into account.
Category: Attention Management Information work Tags:
by Craig Roth | February 6, 2012 | Submit a Comment
Many clients are asking about how to develop mobile custom applications, create mobile front-ends to existing applications, secure their mobile content, select mobile devices, craft mobile policies, and manage the devices. Those are all very good questions to ask and critical to supporting the needs of flexible, distributed organizations and workers.
But what about mobile access to general-purpose knowledge infrastructure and end-user development of collaborative apps? Once you get past all the security issues, how will the end users actually be able to access content and collaborate on their devices? Solid mobile device management, development, and information protection does not mean you have achieved collaboration endpoint independence. There’s still a gap for general purpose and end-user developed collaborative applications.
Increasingly, the most valuable work in organizations cannot be automated with process-centric applications (such as ERP and CRPM) or custom transactional applications. The work is de-routinized: ad hoc, tacit, non-repeatable. Your job is to figure out what your job is to meet ever-morphing organizational goals. For de-routinized work, general purpose knowledge infrastructure and end-user developed collaborative apps are essential. These include flexible tools such as collaborative spreadsheets, e-mail, social networking, wikis, blogs, and quick methods for business users to develop simple collaborative apps (lists, forms, libraries, newsletters) that don’t require IT involvement.
Gartner’s Tom Austin wrote in “Watchlist: Continuing Changes in the Nature of Work, 2010-2020” that work will be de-routinized since “The core value that people add is not in the processes that we can automate. The core value lies in non-routine processes, uniquely human, analytical or interactive contributions that result in words like "discovery, innovation, teaming, leading, selling and learning." Indeed, a Gartner Strategic Planning Assumption is that by 2015, 40% or more of enterprise work will be "non-routine," up from 25% in 2010. This concurs with a McKinsey study that showed the importance and growth of tacit work.
So if mobile workers in de-routinized roles are to be productive, they will require their mobile workplaces to support these technical needs. Accordingly, those in charge of assembling their mobile ecosystems and designing mobile workplaces (and hopefully there is a real person doing that!) must also evaluate how users will create and access general purpose knowledge infrastructure.
- Will the end-user developed collaborative apps created on the intranet be accessible from their devices or will they remain a bottleneck?
- Can the pace of forming, querying, informing communities be maintained while moving in and out of formal offices, or will social networking ebb and flow based on travel schedules?
- Will mobile workers have equal opportunity to contribute to collaborative work products, or will deliverables unevenly favor the views of office-bound peers?
- Will general-purpose enterprise communication tools work on the range of devices commonly used by employees, or will they be forced to choose between the general-purpose apps they need and the devices they want? And who will win?
- Will a mobile workplace be designed that integrates general-purpose knowledge infrastructure in a contextual manner that limits views to just what is needed, or will complex desktop-based navigation and window switching be forced onto tiny screens?
- Do the existing set of knowledge infrastructure support the mobile form factors and devices that will be used? If not, do the existing products need to be tweaked, front-ended, enhanced with 3rd party add-ins, or supplemented by mobile alternatives?
- Will creation of work artifacts (such as starting new documents, new spreadsheets, new discussion forums) be endpoint independent, or are mobile devices relegated to viewing and tweaking artifacts created back at the office?
These are just a few of the questions that will be left over after the custom mobile development, mobile content security, and mobile device management issues are dealt with. Better to prepare now then to get to the mobile finish line and realize it’s just the start of another race.
Category: Collaboration Information work Mobile Tags:
by Craig Roth | February 3, 2012 | 3 Comments
Well, this whole virtual collaboration thing, working from anywhere at anytime, was a nice try but now I guess it’s over. So says Lucy Kellaway in the Economist’s “Year in 2012” issue (Back to Formality). I’d best transition my industry analysis coverage area (collaboration, communication) to dry cleaning of wool suits, corporate real estate trends, and maybe start a magic quadrant on landline desk phones.
I’d like to know what others think of this prediction, but, appropriately, there seems to be no way to comment on this article. Presumably this is because you should be commenting on it around the water cooler, not with the dinosaurs still working at Starbucks.
First, here’s what Ms. Kellaway predicts for this year:
In 2012 the following will be back in fashion: the landline, the jacket, the commute, the handshake and above all the office itself. Out of fashion will be the virtual office in which employees sit hunched over laptops in their local Starbucks, joined to their colleagues by webcam and e-mail. Instead, working life will start to resemble its old self before the internet was invented. Employees will turn up to work at predictable hours five days a week, and will comport themselves with greater formality than before. Face-to-face meetings will be preferred to video conferences; ideas will be exchanged not by tweet, but by the coffee machine.
And as for the power of social software to help connect new workers to others that know the tricks of the trade or where information is, forget it. You’re stuck with whoever is physically within 100 yards of you:
Managers will start to realise that remote working has been disastrous for spreading corporate culture, and that in particular it has made it difficult for younger workers to pick up the tricks of the trade. With no one to copy, they have failed to adjust well to the world of work. The new formality will suit the young: they will turn up to work smartly dressed and have no option but to immerse themselves in the corporate culture and learn from those above them in the pecking order.
OK, I’ll admit my bias upfront. My team and I cover all the technologies Ms. Kellaway derides (web conferencing, e-mail, microblogging, social networking) as well as the new ways of working they enable. It’s actually refreshing to see someone arguing for the status quo. Her bio says she “pokes fun at management fads and jargon.” But I strongly doubt we’ll look back on the first decade of the 21st century and say “remember that fad where workers thought they could collaborate virtually and everyone was sending emails?” I have worked virtually for 14 years now at three different companies and while there are disadvantages, the advantages have won out. I voluntarily go into the office about once a week for various reasons, which seems to fit my ideal blend of old style and the virtual style of working.
One has to remember the drivers that made these technologies essential to the corporate tool belt. To say they are fads means also believing these drivers were fads:
- Globalization: The odds of everyone you need to be successful being present in the same office are increasingly remote. And I’ll also lump flexibility and outsourcing in the supply chain into this category as well. Good luck getting everyone you need in the same place, five days a week, from 9-5.
- Increased organizational agility: The need to respond quickly to events. While the status quo allowed quick creation of physical war rooms, it’s far more common to need to gather intelligence, ideas, and buy-in from a distributed virtual workgroup at all hours of the day.
- Broader talent pooling: I hire research analysts and I am quite happy to be able to draw from a nationwide (or worldwide) talent pool since we work virtually rather than the best analyst I can find within 30 miles of my location (no offense to one of my analysts who, coincidentally, does live within 30 miles of me!). For generalized jobs it may not matter, but a corollary to this driver is increased job specialization.
- Work/life flexibility: The jury is out on whether anytime/anywhere mobile access helps the worklife balance or hinders it. But there is no doubt this technology has introduced flexibility that wasn’t possible back when I had to babysit 2am production releases in the office (loneliness is having to wave your arms around every 10 minutes so the lights don’t turn off on you).
As for culture, I’m not sure the degree to which 1970’s office culture or social-technology-enabled Gen Y culture will win out, but it will be some blend of the two. There are certain people who make a good impression when leading, arguing, persuading, or connecting in person, and there are others who are more persuasive using virtual technologies. It’s nice to give the virtually persuasive folks a louder voice and I think the diversity of views and approaches is paying off.
If there’s a sudden resurgence of office workers voluntarily dressing in suits and ignoring virtual teammates then I’d predict that to be a short term fad, not the other way around.
Category: Information work Tags:
by Craig Roth | February 1, 2012 | 2 Comments
The amount of unstructured content being produced is increasing at an exponential rate and is increasingly spread across repositories, uncategorized, and untagged. Is your first thought:
- A. Oh my gosh! How can these information assets be protected?
- B. Oh my gosh! How am I going to be able to find anything or notice anything important?
- C. Oh my gosh! How can I make money by creating technology products to ride this wave?
- D. Oh my gosh! How can I make sure my target consumers notice my product messaging in all this noise?
- E. Big deal. This has been happening since Gutenberg and we have always adapted.
- F. That’s why I don’t use computers.
From your response, I think I can tell who you are:
- A. You are an information security, legal, identity, or privacy practitioner
- B. You are an overburdened information worker, the IT owner of information systems, or a researcher in human computing interfaces (HCI), augmented cognition (AugCog), or user interface/experience design (UI or UX)
- C. You are a software vendor (or pharmaceutical researcher for 5-Hour Energy!)
- D. You are in marketing, probably trying to increase sales for a discretionary product
- E. You are a pundit
- F. You are a Luddite
Seriously though, I’m amazed at the number of narratives that launch in different directions from this common “information everywhere” starting point. And each role has difficulty seeing the other angles. Take me for example – through my research and writing on enterprise attention management, I live in bubble B (how to find and notice important stuff). Most people I read and interact with on this subject are also in bubble B, so it becomes easy to forget there are so many people that are equally focused on their angle.
As another example, when I met with a bunch of “context aware computing” analysts, they were almost entirely focused on helping service providers utilize context (starting with location based services) to hit consumers with the right message at the right time to increase their sales (choice D).
Information proliferation will continue so it’s important to recognize all of the response vectors, ranging from opportunity to threat. Preparation is the best defense.
Category: Attention Management Information work Tags:
by Craig Roth | January 30, 2012 | Submit a Comment
Many information workers have Office intertwined in their daily work lives and many will get new versions from their IT departments automatically at some point without personally having to pay for it, so a new version of Office can feel like waiting to see what goodies Santa brought you this year.
Well, the wait will soon be over. Microsoft just announced the Office 15 technical preview, so some workers will be able to see the new features in the Summer.
Before we actually find out what is in Office 15, I’d like to say what I think should be in Office 15. I don’t mean piddly features here and there (why doesn’t paste as unformatted text have a hotkey out of the box?), but a major rethinking of what the office suite is.
I’m currently working on an update to my 2008 document “Content Authoring in the Enterprise 2.0 Age.” This document argues that commonly used content creation tools such as word processors and spreadsheets are being challenged by Enterprise 2.0 trends: collaborative authoring, content reuse, living documents, freshness preference, and content landmines. Organizations that respond to these next-generation content creation trends will be better positioned to create and disseminate the information that forms the core of their businesses. I go on to show how “core authoring needs” (the “document” as container, solo authoring, copy/paste reuse, collaboration via e-mail or tracked changes) are being expanded those 5 Enterprise 2.0 authoring trends.
Armchair pundits like to speculate whether Microsoft will ever lose its incredible dominance in Office suites. My answer was given in a series of content creation seminars I did a a few years ago:
If Microsoft is ever dethroned in the content creation market, it will not be because they were beat on features or marketing … it will be because of a fundamental shift in the content creation market for which they failed to adapt.
In other words, it is not Vendor X that will beat them by being cheaper or more feature rich. It’s Suite X that will beat them with a different set of technologies that addresses a unique but growing subset of content creators. There is a fundamental shift in how content is being created. It has bubbled up from old concepts such as collaborative editing and been picked up by web 2.0 and its Gen Y adherents who think in rapidly produced, hyperlinked, searchable content chunks instead of ponderous, static, e-mailed documents.
To do that would require a fundamental reworking of the Office suite, probably splitting off a new product suite to better capture this small, new, growing target market. By carving out space for a new product, they build incremental revenue, plant seeds for a new small but rapidly growing franchise, and better compete with innovative vendors unencumbered by entrenched bureaucracy and sunk costs. As a bonus, this would help mitigate the bloat and complexity of Office by separating out features that will be unused or confusing for many core Office users.
But this is what I recommended for Office 14 (see my 2009 posting What Microsoft Office 14 Needs: A New, Separate SKU) and it didn’t happen then either. It’s risky. They would be playing with a very large revenue stream to compete against a set of needs/vendors that aren’t really a threat right now.
I feel these needs are percolating beneath the surface and if and when they ever catch fire, they will do so more quickly than Microsoft’s 3-4 yr product cycle can defend against. I think it would be wise at some point to start a new franchise that addresses a new market and a new way of authoring, without abandoning the existing suite of course. In the meantime, content authors (which is everyone) should familiarize themselves with all the alternative forms of content that now exist beyond word processing doc, spreadsheet, presentation, and email.
Category: Microsoft Office Tags:
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 | Comments Off
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.
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