Tom Austin
VP & Gartner Fellow
17 years at Gartner
41 years IT industry
Tom Austin, vice president, has been a Gartner fellow for a decade. He is chief of research for social software, collaboration, communications, information management, business intelligence and high-performance workplace (HPW) research. Read Full Bio
by Tom Austin | November 21, 2011 | Comments Off
Harumph! Have you ever noticed all the emails that you receive that say “Do not reply to this email”?
I bought a new car from a US big three manufacturer in October — and have been inundated with satisfaction surveys offered via email — email to which I can’t respond. If I could, I’d tell them to stop sending me these emails!
I buy my airline tickets through a really big travel-related firm with strong corporate presence. They send me emails with, for example, invoices and itineraries, warning “This email box is unmonitored”.
I rented a car from a new upstart whose reservation confirmation says “Do not reply to this email!”
I just received a “complaint” from my corporate travel expense processing application warning me I had not filed a report for an expense charged to my corporate credit card and the charged item was now 15 days old. Could I ask them to stop harassing me until I got back from the end of my 17 day trip? Not likely — you guessed it, didn’t you? The email complaint warned “Do not reply to this email”.
Amongst us, we’re working on a prediction about the business impact of firms not paying attention to social media. But wait a minute. What about firms that don’t want to pay attention to email either?
There is really no excuse for this insensitive approach. Firms can build in a special reply-to address that will route your reply to customer service (if they really have such a thing). Lack of attention to this opportunity suggests to me, as an individual, that they don’t care.
Of course, this is not an official Gartner position. It’s a personal take.
What if we set up rules in our email clients to automatically delete all emails that say “Do not reply to this email”?
Replies welcome…
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
by Tom Austin | June 11, 2011 | Comments Off
I was inspired by a review of Bob Lutz latest book, “Car Guys vs. Bean Counters” that I found in today’s Wall Street Journal.
I’ve followed Lutz for at least 20 years. Unconventional. Iconoclastic. The “review” of his latest book is worth reading.
Lutz has always been a guy with more passion and emotion than a typical “corporate type”. In a way, he’s a Steve Jobs type — intensely focused on the product experience.
One could argue that the Lutz approach is needed in certain areas (e.g., design). That’s what’s made Jobs and Apple so successful in the last decade. The Lutz piece also raises the question of how do you ensure the culture learns from and perpetuates the same patterns in the future. By his words, Porsche has done it. Most others have not. Why not?
I have mixed feelings about the two approaches. Sometimes, you want and need the analytical and consensus based approach. Sometimes, you want design inspiration and passion, along with a bit of autocracy. Consensus rarely produces insanely different breakthroughs. It breeds conformity. Conformity is good…except when it isn’t.
How do you balance these opposite vectors? Which makes the most sense? When is the current choice wrong? How do you change the course of your enterprise or industry?
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
by Tom Austin | June 10, 2011 | Comments Off
In her post on the HBR site, “People are not Cogs”, author Nilofer Merchant argues persuasively that people matter, people engagement is important to business performance and most organizations don’t get it, behaving as though we are all still running an industrial age factory.
Have you figured out how to bridge the gap between performance oriented people and people oriented performance? Read her post and let us know.
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
by Tom Austin | June 6, 2011 | Comments Off
If most of your employees are dissatisfied with their lot in (business) life, don’t implement and encourage the use of social tools inside the enterprise. Or so it seems given the central message in some recent social sciences research that was based on applying text analytics across large amounts of Facebook data.
On the other hand, if, from a management point of view, you’re trying to build positive emotional momentum for whatever you’re trying to accomplish with the business, look seriously at social tools as a potentially powerful element in a broader overall strategy. Check out the summary in The Mercury News. While the article is focused on Facebook, the implications are broader and pertain to the use of any social technologies in the enterprise as well.
(Of course, giving employees some social tools in a bad environment might result in some positive discussion if it’s done well. But don’t miss the heart of the story.)
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
by Tom Austin | April 12, 2011 | Comments Off
We are being overrun by -aaSs. They’re being stuck on everything from Software to Storage (SaaS versus SaaS) and virtually everything in between.
.
I know it’s too much to ask that we disrupt the -aaSification of the industry too soon. Everyone is doing it these days (much like sticking e before everything a dozen years ago was seen as the cool, must-do thing). But we’re about to suffocate from excessive suffixes, a form of suffixation-suffication.
.
I will persist in thinking that sticking aaS on the tail end of everything will, in a few years time, be viewed as a really silly aas affectation. We will get over it.
.
This penchant for suffixation-suffocation was originally driven by a search for a middle-ground between selling software versus delivering a service that doesn’t require you buy software.
.
Think about it. When you buy “Software as a Service”, you’re buying a lot more than the purchase-free use of the software. You’re renting the use of the software on top of rented hardware, system administration and so forth. Every time I’m looking for a taxi it seems, I think of the irony of going to the head of the taxi queue and asking for what, an automobile as a service? Try it some time. Feign a funny accent while doing it too. See how the world reacts.
.
Instead of “Dev/Test-aaS” (DTasS for short??), aren’t we talking about cloud-based dev/test? Is it time for someone to lead us out of the world of proliferating aaSes? What do you think?
.
Please deliver us from excess -aaS!
Photo (c) 2007 – Tom Austin. All rights reserved
Category: Uncategorized Tags: aaS, SaaS
by Tom Austin | February 13, 2011 | 1 Comment
Our email/IM/calendaring tools could get a lot better than they are.
-
This post started out as a rant about “Out of office” messages that read something like this: ”Please STOP and read this message. I will be unavailable for the next 13 days.” This is an example of the useless lengths people will go trying to help others understand whether and when they might respond to an email message.
-
It’s useless because no one will be able to remember this. It’s really a sign of how poorly these products have evolved in terms of helping people work with near and far neighbors alike. And it confuses “ability to read/respond to an email message” with “doing the work you’re asking for”.
-
Over the past several years, the industry has gushed all over itself with the glories of presence indicators. Presence (the ability to almost automatically know if someone is “busy” or not) is a truly inadequate surrogate for knowledge about the capacity, availability and interest of others in your email message.
-
Users deserve better.
-
We ought to be able to find out capacity and availability. So instead of an email client (or an IM tool) telling us the individual is “out”, we ought to know how long that person is expected to be out (like “On vacation for the next 2 months”) and the amount of free time the person is willing to dedicate to the demands of others.
-
The latter capacity number might also be tune-able by sender, that is, if it’s your boss who’s inquiring as to capacity, your “capacity” indicator might show a different response than if it’s your ex, seeking your assistance. It ought to also be driven by other commitments you’ve made (task completion takes time … these systems should be able to aggregate personal time estimates by task).
-
Interest is another key variable. My interest in subjects varies and my interest level will change over time, depending on what else is going on and what I’m currently working on. Senders should be warned that I don’t read press releases from PR firms, for example. (Never say never — I sometimes take the time to point PR agencies towards vendor.briefings@gartner.com before flagging their email address for permanent blocking.)
-
It would be great to see “presence” enrichened to show availability, capacity and relative interest level. That would really help. On the receiving end, it would be great (as in the IBM Social Lens research tool) to move a slider to indicate different levels of interest in peripheral email. That’s not a solution but an interesting step in the right direction.
-
I know that these features aren’t found in the prototypical email and calendaring applications of the 1980s and the nascent IM tools of the 1990s so I’m not surprised to not see these features today. It takes a lot of boldness to bring out new capabilities like these.
-
[Meanwhile, I've finally gotten rid of my special "out of office" macros that automatically warn senders that I'm away every time they send "TO:" me an email when I'm unavailable. It was interesting to see some respondents complain that they didn't like these repeated reminders, if for no other reason the irony of that complaint was typically lost on those folks. But the repeated messages never seemed to have any impact on behavior other than that. So I've given up on that technique.]
-
What do you think you’d like to see to make your email sending and receiving process more effective?
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
by Tom Austin | February 9, 2011 | 2 Comments
The industry lost a down to earth giant on Sunday night. Ken Olsen, co-founder of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) passed away.
At lot of words have been written about him, including repetitions of the out-of-context claim that he had no vision for personal computers and couldn’t see why anyone would want one. That quote misrepresents his thinking. Check out the Snopes article but read it through.
The core reason Digital failed was the executive team (with Ken in the lead) flew the plane into the side of a mountain chasing the dream of a VAX mainframe (VAX 9000) that would be technically superior to and beat out IBM mainframes at the same time that the whole IBM mainframe market was tanking.
All the other stuff is window trimming, e.g., the hot/cold/hot/cold reaction to the PC market (82, 84, 86 and 88), the collapse of entrepreneurialism in favor of more centralized management when the independent product lines were effectively shut down (summer 83).
- We built a client-server email system before anyone in the PC and LAN business was selling any in any volume.
- We had “minicomputers” inside terminals that functioned as stand alone personal computers before Gates created his BASIC for the Altair MITS machine — LSI PDP-8′s running OS/8 inside a VT5x. In my office at Dickinson College, I had a LSI-11 (running RT-11 at the time) that was no larger than a coffee table. And it could do productive work.
But the company “blew” its capital on the VAX9000 investment and that was all she wrote.
Ken cared about people. His people were more important to him than his stock price.
Between his deep belief in his people and his swinging away at the mainframe opportunity, the board decided it had to replace him to salvage value for the shareholders.
That’s my sense after 17.5 years at DEC (starting in November, 1976).
Pursuit blindness is a horrible failure, of course. Can you think of any other companies suffering from it today?
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
by Tom Austin | December 16, 2010 | Comments Off
A month ago, I download a copy of the RedLaser app for my iPhone as I headed out the door for Australia. In an airport along the way, I saw Clive Cussler’s new novel, Crescent Dawn. But instead of buying it, I shot a picture of its barcode with RedLaser which immediately clued me in: I could get the book for up to 40% less elsewhere. Bingo. No sale in the retail bookshop.
Today’s Wall Street Journal featured a story on how these technologies were striking fear in the hearts of retailers. A dozen years ago, there was fear, uncertainty and doubt about how the Internet would affect retail. Before the dust of the dot com crash had settled in 2001, it was pretty obvious that the Internet just wasn’t going to kill smart retailers — the best often created “Clicks and Bricks” strategies to outwit the fleet of foot e-tailers.
If you want to preserve the illusion that the past is prolog, assume that retail survives with some smart minor adjustments. And ignore the rest of this post.
If you want to be creative, ask what entirely new business models might emerge from the dust of this collision between smart phones, smarter buyers, almost-ubiquitous wireless internet services and retail. If wholesalers, distributors and manufacturers are going to push product at discount to disintermediate the retailers and capture the extra profit for themselves, what major changes might we see? (After all, why won’t they do that?)
In some product segments, we may see the strongest of retailers refuse to sell products from manufacturers who are cutting them out of the profit. Sort of like the “fair trade laws” I remember from my youth — laws that are being reinstated in some states these days. (Fair trade laws essentially allow manufacturers to set minimum selling prices for their products and cut off any seller who violates their pricing strictures. Some consumer organizations have called them unfair trade laws but that’s only a comment on the label. I’ll leave it to you to think about what’s right and fair in the area of manufacturer restraints. In the end, I think fair trade laws are a reflection of relative political power — consumers versus manufacturers.)
More interestingly, if the retail moves from something like 6% over the Internet to 40 or 50% in the next five years (there’s a big shift coming based on economics but I’m not in a position to issue a formal forcast, that’s not my job), then we might see retailers moving to a showcase model.
Imagine going to a television showcaser who features several different brands of TV — but holds no inventory. Instead, they will be compensated by the manufacturers and will place orders for customers with either one of the manufacturers or one of the manufacturer’s distributors — picking the supplier that best meets the customer’s needs (availability, bundled services, etc.) [Immediately delivery might be possible if the distributor was next door to the retailer but showcasing, selling and customer engagement would be owned by the former retailer.]
That’s similar to the old catalog showroom model employed by the likes of Montgomery Ward and Sears. Customers would go to the catalog showroom, pick what they wanted and order it. In the new world of RedLasers though, the retailer would no longer hold inventory. And they would represent multiple brands.
This, of course, wrecks the business models of the manufacturers, or so it seems. They want to convey the goods and get paid when they ship. Of course, in the modern world, terms are tuned. Smart retailers often negotiate terms like net 180 when they can expect sell through in 120 days. So the manufacturers aren’t necessarily doing well with those financial concessions — they might be better off paying a sales commission to the showcaser-sales point (formerly known as the retailer) instead of letting the retailer make money on the terms (i.e., retailers can make money on the spread between when they sell the goods and when they have to pay).
Interesting world, isn’t it?
Smart phones (operated by more savvy people), accessing the Internet, now threaten to do what the Internet alone couldn’t do — turn retail, distribution, wholesaling and even manufacturing on its ear. Not that two decades from now it won’t look obvious and good. But for now, the transitions threaten to make life really painful for some. They also create opportunities to make billions upon billions of dollars successfully building and executing the new business models.
What new models will emerge? What will it do to your industry? How will you respond?
Every day is an adventure in change, opportunity, threats and new insights.
Enjoy it!
Category: Business Models Internet Uncategorized ecommerce smart phones Tags:
by Tom Austin | December 13, 2010 | Comments Off
Writing in the NY Times, David Carr writes, in “WikiLeaks Taps Power of the Press” how Wikileaks discovered the value of scarcity in generating value.
In his words, tracing WikiLeaks information releases, Carr opines that WikiLeaks has become more selective and hence more “strategic” and has been rewarded (by the 4th estate — the press) with deeper, more extensive coverage of its revelations.
The same phenomena operate inside enterprises. If you just dump information on someone’s desk, it will likely be ignored. Filtration, integration and analysis add value to information. That doesn’t mean that all information needs to be locked up and hidden in compartmentalized fashion. If there are explicit needs to block access, so be it. (Surprisingly, it’s not clear how much of the information leaked by Wikileaks to the press really needed to be locked up — some of it was apparently nothing more than reportage of events documented in local newspapers.)
But how much, inside the enterprise, do we limit access to information to protect positional power and influence? Does the organization gain or lose in the individual manager’s manipulations of access for personal gain? (Then again, how likely are any of us to influence those managers to relax their tight control over information access and flow? Not very.)
Last year, I included a formula in a Gartner presentation entitled “Enterprise 2.0 Got It Backwards”. The formula tried to characterize the degree of resistance inside an organization to “Enterprise 2.0” attributes like information-democratization and empowerment of “end effectors”, those in direct contact with customers. The formula conjectured that
r = f(n^m)
where r, resistance to Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0) attributes, was a function of the size of the organization (where n equals the number of people in the organization) raised to the power of the number of layers of management (m). I’ll add that the age of the organization is another key factor, the longer standing, the less likely to be open to E2.0 approaches.
The issue here is access to the free flow of information inside the organization.
Are you developing strategies that benefit from a free flow of information in an organization within which managers benefit from (and often exploit) scarcity of information? How do you deal with this issue?
Category: Collaboration Enterprise 2.0 Social culture transparency Tags:
by Tom Austin | December 6, 2010 | 1 Comment
The New York Times had an elegant but dystopic vision of the future of work captured in its recent photo essay http://nyti.ms/hfPRae wherein photographer Piotr Relinksi sketches out life, as it were, in the Atlas Cafe in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
A busy world of solitary confinement within a sea of others. The caption on the last picture (shot, no doubt, from the outside looking in) bears unseen testimony to recognition of others.
I love the imagery but see a different world.
Saturday past, I stepped into a Panera Bread shop on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, west of the center of the Boston University campus and saw a different vision. The place was full but there were clusters of people as well as singletons. The clusters?
- Seated directly to my right was a hastily convened workgroup of three, working on a team project. They’d apparently decided to rendezvous in Panera to work out some of the details of their paper.
- In the back room, there was a group of four, pointedly gesturing to one another over their laptops.
- There were a number of work-couples, pairs going over notes, either filling each other in on details missed or studying together for finals.
- There was a 7 person “family unit”, sans laptops of any kind (unless you count the infant sitting on one of their laps), chatting away
And it wasn’t all clusters, of course:
- There were probably another 20 people in the restaurant, sitting quietly, reading on their laptops, working on some projects in a solitary fashion.
- And there was a seasoning of singletons unadorned by laptops (but often texting someone, somewhere, given their fingering activities).
I wrote about nuances of the world of work this year in a piece for our clients entitled “Watchlist: Continuing Changes in the Nature of Work, 2010-2020 (http://www.gartner.com/resId=1331623) but the message in this blog post is much simpler: the future of work is going to be a mix of many styles, not just one, evolving in various ways in different environments and cultures.
More to come…
Category: Uncategorized Tags: work
