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

Opening the Black Box: Analytics and Admissions

@peteyMIT via @EthanZ explains how technology is changing the university admissions process.

When kids apply to university in the USA, it is becoming increasingly common to include a link with supplementary information about the applicant - for example a project tumblr, a YouTube video, a Flickr album of artwork. The links are typically coded to track visitors, giving the applicant some idea about the level of interest the universities are showing. Chris Peterson finds this an uncomfortable experience: "As admissions officers, we are accustomed to reading applications; now, applications are reading us. ... Applicants are now armed with unprecedented insight into the processes that decide their fate."

There are several problems with this. Applicants and their parents may be misled by the tracking signals collected by these digital supplements, which may yield an entirely false picture of the university process. And yet applicants may attempt to use these signals as evidence that an application has not been properly considered. Even if the university attempts to block the analytics, this may still send the wrong message. (The absence of a signal is still a signal.)

In the past, analytics were a tool used by large organizations to monitor and control their customers. We are now seeing analytic platforms that seem to allow customers to monitor and control large organizations. Large organizations now need to understand how much information they are exposing to these platforms, and what conclusions their customers may draw. We can expect similar examples to appear in many other sectors.


Chris Peterson, Opening the Black Box: Analytics and Admissions (Chronicle of Higher Education, January 2013)

Updated 25 June 2015