Guy Creese
Research VP
4 years at Gartner
32 years IT industry
Guy Creese is a vice president and research director for Gartner Research, in Burton Group's Collaboration and Content Strategies service. He covers a range of topics at the intersection of collaboration, content management, and communications. Read Full Bio
by Guy Creese | September 9, 2010 | 1 Comment
If you’re looking for proof that social software offers business value, here are some examples.
First, some proof points from an article from The Economist entitled, “Mining Social Networks: Untangling the Social Web.” It offers some stories of how social network analysis (SNA) is being used, such as decreasing credit risks for banks.
The latest version of SAS’s software identifies risky borrowers by examining their social networks and Internal Revenue Service records, she says. For example, an applicant may be a bad risk, or even a fraudster, if he plans to launch a type of business which has no links to his social network, education, previous business dealings or travel history, which can be pieced together with credit-card records. Ms Joyner says the software can also determine if an applicant has associated with known criminals—perhaps his fiancée has shared an address with a parolee.
Or helping police optimize their staffing:
Richmond [VA]’s police have started monitoring Facebook, MySpace and Twitter messages to determine where the rowdiest festivities will be. On big party nights, the department now saves about $15,000 on overtime pay, because officers are deployed to areas that the software deems ripe for criminal activity. Crime has “dramatically” declined as a result, says Mr Hollifield.
Another example is what can happen to a company when it ignores the power of social software. The first chapter of Empowered: Unleash Your Employees, Energize Your Customers, and Transform Your Business
, by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler, details the saga of Heather Armstrong, a blogger and mother of two whose new Maytag washer broke down a week after she’d bought it. After several failed attempts over a month to fix the washer and multiple calls to customer service, Heather finally said to a customer support rep,
And here’s where I say, do you know what Twitter is? Because I have over a million followers on Twitter. If I say something about my terrible experience on Twitter do you think someone will help me? And she says in the most condescending tone and hiss ever uttered, “Yes, I know what Twitter is. And no, that will not matter.”
Oops. It turns out it did. Heather started tweeting about her experience and all of a sudden Maytag corporate (actually, Whirlpool corporate) cared. They finally fixed the machine. However, in the meantime, Heather’s original blog post received 2,906 comments and Forbes did a story on the episode.
In summary, social software does matter. If an enterprise isn’t leveraging it within its business initiatives, there’s still a chance that a disgruntled customer will use it against the enterprise. Put another way, ignoring social software is not a viable strategy.
Category: Social Software Tags: Social network, Social Software, Twitter
by Guy Creese | September 8, 2010 | Comments Off
Next week, I’ll be at Gartner’s PCC Summit in London. For those of you not familiar with Gartner lingo, PCC stands for “Portals, Communication, and Content.”
This, of course, is the Collaboration and Content practice’s sweet spot, since we cover communications (e.g., e-mail, IM, web conferencing), collaboration (e.g., workspaces, social software, SharePoint, Lotus Notes), and content (e.g., document management, web content management, portals). Although I won’t be presenting per se, I will be in the audience, available for one on one’s with clients, and happy to talk about Gartner’s IT1 service. So if you plan on attending, please look me up.
Category: Analyst Life Tags: Gartner, London
by Guy Creese | September 2, 2010 | 2 Comments
I bought an Apple iPad for two reasons: sentimental reasons and business reasons.
First, the sentimental. Twenty years ago when I worked at Wang Laboratories, I was involved in the development of a tablet PC (we called them pen PCs in those days). The Guide was a 386-based tablet with a 20 MB hard drive. It was the second production tablet PC in the market; NCR beat us to release by about two weeks.
It was called The Guide because the specification for it–I kid you not–was the electronic book described in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Unlike other tablet PCs at the time, The Guide was not a notebook with a digitizer slapped on it. Instead, it really tried to be an electronic helper–it included a modem, you could send faxes with it, and you could dictate memos via a built-in digital recorder. However, while the goal was laudable, it just wasn’t possible given the state of technology in 1990. I bought the iPad, in part, because I felt that it finally delivered on what we were trying to do two decades ago.
The business reasons. I attend conferences and day-long meetings that rarely supply electricity (or good WiFi, for that matter). If I bring my laptop, I can take notes for half a day and then my battery runs out. Also, because I can rarely connect to the Internet I can’t watch my e-mail. The iPad fixes both those problems: it has a battery life of 9+ hours and the 3G version can get e-mail anywhere.
In addition, one of my co-workers told me, “The iPad has completely changed how I read content. Instead of sitting at my desk with my PC, I load my iPad with reports and read them sitting in a chair. It’s so much more enjoyable.” And he’s right. In the past month, I’ve read more tweets and RSS feeds than I’ve read all year. And given that I need to stay on top of what’s happening in the IT world, that’s a good thing.
So those were my reasons for buying an iPad, and I’m glad I did.
Category: Analyst Life Tags: Apple, IPad, Tablet, Wang Laboratories
by Guy Creese | September 1, 2010 | 2 Comments
At the end of July I purchased an Apple iPad–and then took it on a week long family vacation in the mid-Atlantic states.
And it was great. I was able to:
- Stay up to date with work e-mails, Twitter, and RSS feeds.
- Monitor the local weather (via WeatherBug, The Weather Channel, and WunderMap).
- Find close gas stations (via Gas–I bought the 3G version that includes a GPS).
- Watch and avoid slow traffic (via BeatTheTraffic).
- Find nearby restaurants (via FastFood).
- Decide which of several restaurants to go to by previewing their menus online.
- Book a hotel while driving down the road (actually, my wife was driving while I booked a hotel at Marriott.com).
- Find the Admissions Office at Vassar amidst a bunch of poorly labeled buildings.
- Find locations and maps of local shopping malls (via Point Inside).
The interesting thing is that from a feature point-of-view I could have done the same thing with a 3G notebook. However, it’s the usability of the iPad (instant on, weighs very little, tablet interface, custom built tablet apps) that makes all the difference. What would have been a laborious, “Let me wait three minutes while my laptop boots up and then I’ll start typing” process turned into, “Let me open up my electronic book and then I’ll just do a little pointing and clicking.”
So, yes, I have an Apple iPad and am loving it. It works with me rather than against me.
Category: Uncategorized Tags: Apple, IPad, Twitter
by Guy Creese | July 13, 2010 | Comments Off
As an IT industry analyst, I’m always looking for patterns: (1) early signals of an inflection point and (2) the later markers that characterize an era. The patterns can come from anywhere: from vocabulary (e.g., “dot.com,” “to Google something”), from airline routes (during the dot.com era, there were so many VCs and tech company presidents commuting between Boston and San Jose that airlines ran multiple direct flights a day between Boston and San Jose to deal with the load), and from the newsstand.
Let’s talk about the newsstand. My thesis is that popular thud-factor magazines (those half an inch thick or so) characterize an era due to two dynamics. They not only have good-size circulation numbers, but they attract many advertisers (due to the large circulation numbers and desired demographics). In other words, a thick magazine is a physical instantiaton of a perfect storm of reader interest and advertiser sales pitches–each one amplifies the other.
So let’s look at three thud-factor magazines and their eras:
- PC Magazine (mid 1980′s/early 1990′s): At one point, PC Magazine was one of the major magazines for techies; now it’s no longer physically published. In its heyday, PC Magazine was bursting at the seams with ads; Wikipedia notes that it moved to biweekly publication in 1983 after a monthly issue contained more than 800 pages. Readers bought the magazine as much for the ads as for the articles. It’s how you found out what new software was out and what Gateway 2000 was charging for its 386-based PCs. This was the era of gadgets–readers weren’t interested in the big picture, they were interested in speeds and feeds.
- Fast Company (around 2000): Although the magazine is still around, Fast Company‘s heyday was in the dot.com era. Giving a sense of the magazine’s buzz at the time, Wikipedia notes, “In 2000, Fast Company was sold to Gruner + Jahr, majority owned by media giant Bertelsmann, for $350 million. At the time this was the second largest amount for any US magazine in history.” This was a magazine that you lugged around as a trophy–when you got on the Boston-San Jose flight with the 42 other VCs making the trip, conspicuously carrying Fast Company and Wired made it clear that you were one of the dot.com movers and shakers. This was the era of aspiration and the Internet big picture–readers wanted to know about inter-mediation, clicks and bricks, and e-Commerce, and how they could become millionaires in nine months via a hot idea and stock options.
- Real Simple (today): Real Simple is a consumer magazine–appropriate in an era of “the consumerization of IT.” Rather than longing to be overwhelmed with gadgets or “the big picture,” readers now just want to get tasks done with a minimum of fuss and a certain amount of style. This is the era of simplification, ease-of-use, and a Zen outlook. It’s no accident that streamlined Web applications that workers can begin using with no instructions are now popular. Forward-thinking IT departments are feverishly working to move to a hybrid delivery model–being able to run an application both behind the firewall and in the cloud–because they realize that their business users could care less about the techie details of where an application runs: they just want to get their work done.
So there you have it–three different eras, three different magazines. If you work in IT or for a vendor, dump the PC Magazine or Fast Company outlook and go with the Real Simple style….
Category: Analyst Life Tags: Fast Company, Magazines and E-zines, Real Simple
by Guy Creese | July 12, 2010 | Comments Off
The term “security theater” is sometimes used for describing the regulations of the U.S.’s Transportation Security Administration (TSA). For example, their asking to see your driver’s license along with your boarding pass before you get on a plane doesn’t make you all that safe–a terrorist group could easily forge a driver’s license–but it at least makes the passengers feel that “something is being done.” The bustle of the facade is reassuring.
I’ve now realized that there’s such a thing as “IT theater” as well. That is, some IT departments push out systems that aren’t helpful–or even make unnecessary work for users–just so users will feel that “something is being done.”
Two real world examples include:
- For laptop backup, sending out a 160 GB USB drive (with a fixed asset sticker attached) for laptops with 150 GB drives, so that the user can’t make rolling backups. Skimping on the drive size so that the user has to make selective backups is a false economy, given that worker time spent fiddling with the backup process to get everything to fit quickly consumes any savings. Better to send along a 1 TB backup drive (costs around $100 at BestBuy) and let the system automatically execute rolling backups. Another alternative is to offer web-based backup, since if there’s a natural disaster (e.g., fire, flood, or earthquake) probably both the laptop and the backup drive will be toast.
- Sometimes using a series of old, cobbled together systems to handle a previously separate set of processes that have become unified and would be much better controlled with a single, new system. This is tricky, because it’s not cost effective to replace every system. However, sometimes the business changes enough that it really is worthwhile to rethink how to support the process–because the current melange of systems requires too much manual intervention, doesn’t offer unified control and reporting, etc. Often, when IT is asked about the issue, it will say, “We already have systems in place to manage that process” (in other words, “Something is being done.”) The correct business retort is, “No, you have systems in place to manage multiple old processes. I want a system to manage today’s process.”
I’m sure there are many more examples lurking out there. You can probably come up with some you know.
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
by Guy Creese | July 7, 2010 | Comments Off
Earlier in the week Jack Santos pointed me to a new AIIM report on SharePoint. (AIIM used to be an imaging organization; now it pitches itself as targeting the enterprise content management community. The report is free, but you need to register to download it.)
The report makes for interesting reading. Some tidbits that leapt out at me:
- 78% of respondents are either currently using SharePoint or plan to install it. That kind of market penetration makes it an uphill battle for Microsoft competitors such as IBM and Oracle.
- For 23% of the respondents, 100% of their employees access SharePoint, with that percentage forecast to double in the next 12 months. In short, SharePoint is on a trajectory to foster enterprise-wide collaboration.
- Sixteen SharePoint installations are storing more than 20 TB of content.
- The top three applications for SharePoint are (1) workspaces/team sites, (2) document management, and (3) fileshare replacement. This maps to what our clients tell us.
If you have SharePoint installed or are investigating it, I would encourage you to read the report. It has a lot of interesting information, including some SharePoint implementation advice/comments from survey participants (see page 30). The survey is based on replies from 624 AIIM community members. 77% of the participants were from North America; different organization sizes and industry sectors are well represented.
Category: Microsoft SharePoint Uncategorized Tags: AIIM, Microsoft, Microsoft SharePoint
by Guy Creese | July 1, 2010 | Comments Off
Yesterday I installed the Outlook Social Connector–a new add-on to Outlook 2003, 2007, or 2010. To use a phrase from my youth, it’s “kinda nifty.” It’s cutting down on my clicking buttons and resorting messages to find things in my Inbox.
It aggregates information from Outlook as well as LinkedIn and SharePoint (assuming you have the appropriate connectors installed) as a way to give you a one-stop-shop view of a sender: e.g., their e-mails, meetings, and status updates. When you open a message from someone, a People Pane opens up and shows you this information. You can see them all at once (All Items) or filter them (Activities, Mail, Attachments, Meetings, Status Updates).
This add-on from Microsoft is not the only game in town–Xobni and Gist (works with Outlook, Gmail, or Lotus Notes) do somewhat the same thing. So if at times you feel that you’re going through a lot of work to find relevant information within Outlook, you should investigate these three options and see if one would help you, based on the way you work.
Category: Google IBM Microsoft Tags: Microsoft Outlook, Xobni
by Guy Creese | June 23, 2010 | Comments Off
Network World has an interesting interview with Rajen Sheth (“Meet the father of Google Apps [who used to work at Microsoft]”) which describes how Google Apps Premier Edition (GAPE) came to be. Confirming my suspicions, the product did not come out of a desire to meet enterprise e-mail requirements; instead, it was pitched as a reuse of a consumer product Google already had. (Initially, the thought was Gmail for the enterprise would be delivered as an appliance, similar to the Google Search Appliance.)
This simple re-badging explains many of the early product holes, such as the lack of nested distribution lists, no records management, no e-mail or calendar delegation, and so on. Just looking at the product, you knew it had to be, “Let’s take Google Apps, slap an enterprise name on it, and we’ll have an enterprise e-mail system,” but I’d never seen written confirmation of that scenario.
The story also included an interesting quote: "What we’ve focused on is how do we make the Docs suite better, such that more people can use that as their primary office productivity tool." It’s interesting because last year Google refused to participate in my productivity suite quadrant report, saying that it wasn’t a productivity suite but rather a collaboration solution. I’m glad to see Google finally agrees with what I was saying eighteen months ago, when I included it in my report of non-Microsoft productivity suites (“Productivity Suite Proliferation: Is It Time to Ditch Microsoft Office?”).
Category: Google SaaS Tags: GAPE, Google, Google Docs
by Guy Creese | June 21, 2010 | Comments Off
Yesterday I flew into Prague, took a nap, found out I needed to reboot my cellphone to get it to work (thank you Mike Gotta), had dinner at the bar in the Prague Hilton, and then went to bed. (So for those who think I lead an exciting, international jet setter life, no, I haven’t been out of the hotel.)
Today, I’ve started to practice my presentations (I’m giving three) and will attend the keynote by John Seely Brown. So things haven’t quite started yet, but by this evening they’ll be in full swing.
Category: Analyst Life Tags:
