Bring Your Own Expectations

Once upon a time, there was a clear separation between Work and Home. This separation has been undermined by two phenomena.

1. Working at Home - in other words, allowing work to invade the home environment
2. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) - in other words, allowing personal devices to invade the work environment

In this post, I want to talk about a third phenomenon, perhaps more invisible but no less important. Bring Your Own Expectations means that we have all become accustomed to getting what we want from the Internet, and therefore expect to get the same things (or "affordances") from corporate systems and platforms.

One of the most obvious gaps between our expectations and corporate reality is the failure of search. The Internet has an uncanny knack of guessing what we want, and there are strong commercial incentives for Amazon, Facebook, Google and the rest to improve their "mind-reading" capabilities.

In comparison, your company intranet is simply not in the same league, and therefore cannot anticipate your needs in the same way. Some people see this as merely a technical lack, to be addressed by some functionality inside the company firewall that roughly resembles the way Google worked ten years ago. But this is far more than a mere technical shortcoming.

And search is just one difference. There are also expectations about interoperability. For example, do we expect to use one network for linking with colleagues and customers, and a different network for linking with friends and family? Most people are still learning how to manage these different worlds without getting muddled - for example, people who automatically put kisses onto private messages may find themselves carrying this habit into corporate communications. Maybe sometimes our expectations lead us astray.

Some service providers (including notoriously Facebook) insist that you have a single identity for personal and business use. Other service providers accept that people may wish to have two or more accounts, in order to keep personal and business use separate, and are happy to design premium services largely for the business user. A good example of this is DropBox for Business, which allows multiple accounts (e.g. a business account and a personal account) to be synchronized to the same computer. However, people will still expect to have at least as much affordance in the business sphere as in the personal sphere, and will be unhappy if their employer provides (for example) corporate file-sharing services that are not as good as (say) DropBox. (Other file sharing services are available.)

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Related Posts

BYOD Bring Your Own Device (Feb 2012)
On Working At Home (March 2014)
What Shape is Your Intranet (May 2014)


Updated 5 November 2014

What shape is your Intranet?

@djbressler tells us he is work­ing on a thought-piece about the bifur­ca­tion of the intranets from the Inter­net. In the meantime, in a post called Burying the URL (May 2014), he comments on an experimental build of Chrome, which continues the trend of hiding the URL and encouraging people to use search instead. Obviously it benefits Google when people rely exclusively on search. But it's not just Google's Chrome that is doing this; Firefox and Mobile Safari are also going in this direction.

In my post What shape is the internet (September 2010), I said that shifting the emphasis from URL hotlinks to search undermines the idea of the internet's being web-shaped. This point is also made in a post by @apike, referenced by David and also called Burying the URL (April 2014).

URLs are the essence. They make hypertext hyper. The term “web” is no accident – it refers to this explicitly.

See also an excellent Twitter debate following @apike's tweet.


When David talks about bifurcation, he means that "enter­prise IT is diverg­ing enter­prise tech­nol­ogy from con­sumer tech­nol­ogy in a way that’s cre­at­ing two irrec­on­cil­able branches of tech­nol­ogy". He observes that most company intranets have a pretty lousy search facility.

But most company intranets have pretty lousy cross-linking as well. They are mostly just pdf graveyards stuffed with documents of indeterminate pedigree, which people are often reluctant to waste time searching (even if the search facility were better) because they don't expect to find anything of value.

Actually, you can't always find what you are looking for on the Internet either, and that has a lot to do with the limitations of search, but there are enough amusing distractions to conceal this fact. Surely we don't want our company intranets to copy the internet too closely?

And remember that the data revealing Enron's problems were cheerfully displayed on the Enron website. But nobody important had bothered to look at these documents properly. (Actually, a bunch of students had analysed them years previously and concluded that Enron was bankrupt. They probably got low marks for that assignment!)

There is an increasingly common belief that the tech­nol­ogy used inside com­pa­nies should work the same way as outside, should provide the same "affordance". This is not Bring Your Own Device but Bring Your Own Paradigm Expectations. I guess I should work on a thought piece about this.

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Related posts

What shape is the internet (September 2010)
Bring Your Own Expectations (May 2014)

See also Steven Poole, The pdf graveyards can only expect an increase in their undead populations (Guardian 9 May 2014)