Tag Archives: mike gotta

January 20, 2014 | 17 Comments

Lessons Learned From EPIC’s Mobile Apps & Quantified Self Workshop


MikeGotta_CasualMike Gotta (@Mikegotta) is a Research Vice President for collaboration and social software at Gartner. He has more than 30 years of experience in the IT industry, with 14 of those years spent as an industry analyst advising business and IT strategists on topics related to collaboration, teaming, community-building, and social networking. He has expanded his research to include quantified self trends as well as the business use and organizational value of ethnography. He is currently pursuing a master’s degree in Media Studies at The New School in New York City.

At EPIC 2103, Mike Gotta (@Mikegotta) gave a workshop, Mobile Apps & Sensors: Emerging Opportunities For Ethnographic Research, that examined mobile apps developed for ethnographic research uses. I asked Mike to contribute to the January EPIC theme at Ethnography Matters because his research is always spotlighting some of the most fascinating trends in the tech industry. In this article, Mike provides a wonderful overview of his workshop, but even more interesting is his discussion of all the different ways the dialogue veered away from the original topic of the workshop. Essentially, things didn’t go as Mike had planned. The new direction, however, offered Mike a lot of insights into the future of mobile apps, which led him to reflect on personalized sensors as part of Quantified Self trends and the increasing importance of APIs in future research tools.  If you’re a qualitative researcher who wants to know how to make use of the latest mobile apps, this is a must-read article. The second half of Mike’s article can be read on Gartner’s blog.

Mike is currently at Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT), which describes itself as the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company. Mike is a familiar face at Ethnography Matters; during his time at Cisco Systems, Mike contributed to Ethnography Matters a piece that has become one of the most often-cited pieces of research on the role of ethnography in  Enterprise Social Networks (ESN).

For more posts from this January EPIC edition curated by contributing editor Tricia Wang, follow this link.

Slide1You might wonder – what’s a technology industry analyst doing at EPIC and why deliver a workshop on mobile apps and sensors?

The world of the IT industry analyst is becoming much more inter-disciplinary as societal, cultural, economic, media, demographic, and technology trends become more intertwined. These trends, perhaps, were always entangled in some fashion and we are only now becoming more interested in how the patterns of everyday life are mediated by various technologies.

There was a time when industry analysts could cover technology trends and their business relevance as long as they had an IT background. That might still be true in some cases – maybe – but in my opinion, being well-versed in social sciences is becoming a baseline competency for those in my profession.

Which brings me back to EPIC 2013. I had been looking into synergies across design, ethnography, and mobile and was happy to deliver a workshop for EPIC attendees to look at advances in mobile apps that support ethnographic research. As a group, we identified the pro/con’s of mobile apps and discussed how field research could be better supported. The topic was relevant not only to the ethnographic community but also to audiences who interact frequently with industry analysts: digital marketers, innovation teams, design groups, product/service managers, and IT organizations.  It struck me that EPIC (as a conference and organization) is in a position to act as a yearly event touch point between those in the social sciences and business/technology strategists interested in the same issues.Read More… Lessons Learned From EPIC’s Mobile Apps & Quantified Self Workshop

October 12, 2012 | 0 Comments

Ethnozine: October edition


Gabriella Coleman’sethnozine_october research on the enigmatic Anonymous network has provided unique insights and dispeled myths about the group. In a guest contribution this month, Coleman writes about tensions in her work and what it means to be implicated in “the dance between Anonymous and journalism.”

Our other guest contributor, Cisco’s Mike Gotta, writes about rethinking enterprise social networking (ESN) design processes and the value of qualitative research for building ESN systems.

Heather Ford addresses the value of qualitative research in another context in her reflections on a WikiSym conference dominated by quantitative analyses of English language Wikipedia.

And Jenna Burrell discusses the challenges of keeping up with fieldwork from afar in her post on read-along ethnography, in which she examines the possibilities and limitations of understanding a distant fieldsite through a collaborator’s notes and images.

NOTES

NEXT MONTH

Would you like to be our next guest contributor? Ethnography Matters is your space. you can feature a project/paper/book/syllabus, provide a fieldwork update, or share your thoughts. Here are some more ideas for how you can participate. We’d love to hear from you. Email us at ethnographymatters[at]gmail!

September 20, 2012 | 9 Comments

Can Ethnography Save Enterprise Social Networking?


Editor’s note: Enterprise software systems. Sounds a bit boring and inhuman. But they’re not! 

This month, Mike Gotta from Cisco Systems, makes the case for bringing the human back into enterprise software design and development, starting out with enterprise social networking (ESN).

ESN is like Facebook, but just for people who work within a company. But why are businesses investing in ESN when white collar workers are already using Facebook, Google+, or Twitter? Because existing social networks don’t fulfill enterprise needs for security, compliance, and integration with existing systems.  Employees don’t just time-in and time-out, they socialize. And companies want to make the most out of their employees’ social networks whether it’s making it easier for workers to find like-minded colleagues or identifying potential leaders or even locating expertise. Because here’s the thing that most companies really get – people do better work when they feel they have the social support to accomplish their task. 

Small companies might turn to an out-of-box ESN like Salesforce (Chatter), while larger companies buy an ESN platform and then customize it to fit their needs.  But one of the biggest problems with ESN’s right now is that developers and trainers don’t account for culture. Often times ESNs are implemented with little understanding of the company’s social and tech context. For example, companies try to incentivize employees to fill out social profiles, or blog, or join communities, but often employees don’t understand why, or what’s in it for them to change their behavior to collaborate in such a public way. The result – slow adoption of the ESN. Can better design practices solve the problem? How can ethnographers help fill the context and cultural gap?

One company that has been active in the ESN space from the user’s perspective is Cisco. Recently,  Cisco’s collaboration blog featured an essay by Mike Gotta, Design Considerations For Enterprise Social Networks.  We asked Mike to guest blog and he wrote a new introduction for Ethnography Matter readers, explaining why ethnographers are needed for ESN development. 

Mike is currently a senior technology solution manager at Cisco focusing on social software.  Like a true social scientist, Mike says that he’s “fascinated by the non-technological issues related to identity, media literacy, and participatory cultures and their influence on how people learn, share, and collaborate.”  You can follow him on twitter, @MikeGotta.

Mike is also looking for an ethnographer who has experience in social networking and enterprise software design to sit on an upcoming panel in November at the E2.0 conference in San Francisco. Get in touch with him if you know of someone or if you are the right person! 

– Tricia

Check out  past guest bloggers. Ethnography Matters is always lining up guest contributors, we would love to feature your work! Send us an email! 

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First, I’d like to thank Tricia for reaching out and asking me to provide a guest post. Coincidentally, I have been reading Ethnography Matters for a few months now and have become a fan of its content and contributors so I’m happy to participate.

So why am I here? Cisco has become active in the enterprise collaboration and social software markets for the past couple of years with a product called WebEx Social. Several weeks ago, I posted an article on enterprise social networking to our Cisco Collaboration blog. The goal of the article was to summarize a session presented at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston this past June. The second objective was to spark a conversation on the need for companies to invest in qualitative research related to social networks, integrate those practices into design programs, and apply those findings to improve the effectiveness of enterprise social networking (ESN) systems.Read More… Can Ethnography Save Enterprise Social Networking?