Gartner (work in progress…)

I had a Gartner subscription for one year. I also got to interact with their Product Development group. They are definitely working hard to enhance the experience of their clients as they access and manage their Gartner “assets” (documents, analyst calls, conferences, peer-to-peer exchanges, client partner calls, webinars,…).

Since, in one year, I went through the entire life-cycle with Gartner, I would like to share some thoughts on their service.

The interactions I had with Gartner were work related. So, anything I do in that regard, I would want my colleagues to be able to see. In particular I would like to be able to annotate documents (or webinars), share them, and of course see what others have said on those documents.

I envision a platform (that could sit on top of Office 365 for instance) that would play in the collaboration eco-system of “channels”. A channel is a topic (Innovation for instance; like HGTV for housing in the TV world) that brings people together. People post to it; external sources can be made to also post it. Of course this offering could be accessible as a SaaS offering. Ideally such a platform would also be able to aggregate different sources of information (Forrester, Harvard Business Review,…).

So the Gartner subscription would be based on the platform provided to a company, not individuals (even though employees of the same company) subscribing to the same service multiple times. Gartner does not address the knowledge sharing aspects that is so critical to companies now days.

As a matter of fact, anything (especially if it has knowledge attached to it) that can be sold multiple times to a company , through employees of that company, should be approached as a platform enabling collaboration.

Last but not least, off-boarding was terrible! I was not given an opportunity to back up the documents I had saved to my “library”. Nor the posts to my peer-to-peer networks. I was not given notification of what was about to happen. All knowledge I had accumulated and relied upon was gone. Even my trusted client partner did not warn me!

Actor names while watching movies

I can never remember the names of the actors nor the names of the characters when I watch a movie… I would love a key on my remote (my app remote that is) that would allow turning on or off the display of those names.

Signal a meeting is getting near its end

I would like a subtle reminder from my iPhone / iPad (and not both, if they are both near me) that my meeting is getting closer to its end. This is something I would set when I create a meeting invite or when I accept a meeting invite.

Rebuild the enterprise one API at a time

Prepaid cards

So at work they offer me this great benefit: a prepaid card! What about making it available to my kids? Now that becomes useful. Every month a fixed amount goes to their account. Back it up with a great web site / mobile app and this is really useful. But how long before the card is absorbed by their smartphone?

I was told that it’s possible to have several cards per account. I will have to explore that…

Gamification of my typing

When I type a text on my iPad it can correct my typos on the fly. In particular, English being my second language I can actually learn and improve my spelling. On the other hand, sometimes my typos are due to my lack of accuracy. I was thinking that it could be fun to have an indication of how many times spelling correction jumped in to help me…

MS Office applications

Sometimes I get the message asking me if I want to save my work, but I am not sure what I changed! Or if I even changed anything at all! It would certainly help if I could click on a button and see a list of those changes.

Intuit – Usability expertise as a service

Intuit is probably the company with the software product that is so key to the lives of their customers and used by so many people. Couldn’t they have a consultancy arm that would leverage the wealth of experience accumulated developing TurboTax to help smaller companies develop better products?

Intuit – Pay bills

Couldn’t Intuit put some of its innovative thinking in developing a really smart app to manage bill payments? Like BillTracker for iPad by SnapTap.

Intuit – Small business

When I file my tax return TurboTax knows about my small business. Considering the small amount of revenu I report, it could deduce I might need help with remembering some crucial dates, like (in Texas) sales tax return (in January) and Franchise (in May).