Tom Austin

Over the next year, I have several major projects underway. Understand that much of what I do isn’t solo work – as a Gartner Fellow, I drive research across areas and I have personal and unique contributions to make. I’m sharing this because I am looking for input and advice from everyone who reads my blog. Be forewarned. This list is not a formal Gartner agenda. It’s my personal agenda and subject to change without notice. (And, to make it easier to read, I’m breaking it into a few separate posts.)

How can you influence this work? Tell me what interests you, where you have information I should consider, what’s a priority for you. Do it either here or, if you’re a Gartner client, via inquiry.

In priority order (highest to lower), here are my top 3 research content creation priorities for 2010 (content creation takes a second place to direct client service, as in inquiries).

1. Reinventing our research on “High Performance Workplaces” (which also fits into our “Portals, Content and Collaboration” Summits this year)

I’ve been driving a high level view of enterprise investments (and employee investments) in technologies that raise the impact (or performance) of our most valuable people, investments that make people more effective in doing those things for which they’re most valued. (We used to worry about “knowledge workers” as though there were people who worked without knowledge that we could ignore. Fat chance. I’m dropping use of the term “knowledge worker” and coming up with other ways of segmenting and thinking about various classes of work.)

What we have come to learn is that there are contributions that people make that we cannot automate – things like creativity, discovery and teamwork – attributes that we can positively impact even if we can’t automate them. There is a role for people in modern society. This is not a political agenda, it’s a way of analyzing what we are spending on end-user tools (and the quality of the end user experience). We spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year helping people be more effective “on the job”, not on special, department specific, domain focused process automation, but on things like collaboration, communication, communities, informal project coordination tools, crackberries and other horizontal office-related tools. Why? What comes of this? How can we do a better job here?

The high-value added that comes from our investment in people comes from their performance of “non-routine” work. Typing is routine. Creating a powerful new story is “non-routine”. Drawing (as in drafting with pencils and velum) is routine. Sketching an entirely new design model is non-routine.

Who cares? We believe that a significant minority – over 40 percent – of enterprises care about investments that raise people’s performance, particularly in areas that cannot be automated but areas where technology can improve human performance. And the other going on 60% of enterprises should.

I think we erred in recent years by focusing too much on the “workplace” and not enough on the worker; too much on intra-enterprise and not enough on people per-se, whether working with others inside or outside the enterprise; too much on tools, like Microsoft SharePoint, IBM Connections or Google Sites, and not enough on the social and cognitive processes that are the hallmarks to how people work and add value.

In 2010, I am going to be working (with many of my peers and associates) on redefining a focus on adding value to how people contribute value to the businesses they are in. We will provide new measurements (so clients can compare themselves with normative, data-based models we build) and advice on the role of IT organizations in amplifying the value of the human assets enterprises (and others) invest in.

BTW — this work touches on major vendors in many areas, including Microsoft, Google, IBM, Jive … the list goes on and on (more than 30) but the focus of this work is around business cases, benefits, use cases and enterprise strategies.

2. Cloud’s computing services real impact is not cost, speed of start-up or scalability.

I have a very strong belief about massively parallel, highly distributed (MPHD) systems millions of CPUs and exabytes of distributed storage, loosely coupled across multiple, redundant and high performance networks.

My belief is simple: at the scale at which these systems operate, entirely new applications will emerge that were never before thought of. We have tended to act as though computer systems and the applications to which they may be put are scale invariant. And that is wrong, or so I believe.

This is a critical issue. So, for example, instead of using MPHDs to run payroll, ERP or CRM we should be thinking about what entirely new applications will eventually be possible.

It’s my goal to write for Gartner clients about the phase transition from the largest of mainframes and closely coupled multiprocessor systems to new MPHDs…and what it might mean from a *business application* viewpoint.

(This work fits into our cloud computing agenda. It also contributes to our Pattern-Based Strategy research, helping answer the question “how will we better see out indicators of potential disruptive changes ahead” — but it also predates our "Pattern-Based Strategy" work.)

3. Maverick research

I take great pride in driving, for the Gartner Fellows (of whom I am a one) a program aimed at incubating and fostering research that the consensus process inside Gartner might otherwise kill way too soon. I run an RFP process internally for new research streams that the consensus process might stifle and we, the fellows, select the most interesting (disruptive, non-conventional) proposals, shelter the authors and provide them with feedback to help them develop these ideas and expose them to the world through Gartner Symposia/ITExpo and other venues.

Several years ago, I used to create presentations that would amalgamate all of the maverick research selected for the year in a single presentation to let our clients get a view into the “workshop”. This year, I hope to publish a single research piece that summarizes the top proposals we, the Fellows, chose to support.

I’ll post about my other agenda priorities (numbers 4 through 10) later. But here they are:

4. Google’s GAPE (and Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and others)

5. The collective and enterprise business processes

6. IBM Lotus Division

7. Rethinking prior analysis and positions.

8. Adobe (Complex Vendor Lead)

9. Persistent Research Areas

10. Other projects

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