Roger Whitehead

Associate Analyst - Collaboration
Bloor Research

Roger Whitehead has been for over 20 years an independent consultant in the use of computers in business. He advises organisations on the strategic aspects of information technology, and on system and supplier selection and implementation. A particular area of his expertise is in the effects of computing on people and organisations (and vice versa). Roger now focuses on collaboration for Bloor.

Collaboration refers mainly to the use of software designed to aid group communication, decision and action. (It encompasses what used to be referred to as groupware.) The topics Roger watches include enterprise social networking, social business, social media, electronic conferencing (text, voice and video), blogs and wikis.

Roger has consulted to organisations in varied sectors, including banking, broadcasting, food processing, professional services and central government. He works with systems suppliers on product, industry and competitor analyses. He has been a frequent speaker on IT and its use at British and overseas conferences.

For several years, Roger was a guest lecturer on IT in business at Ashridge and Roffey Park management colleges and at ABIN, an international bankers' school near Frankfurt. He has designed industry conferences including the Windows Show, EMAP's Workgroup Computing Show and the conference part of CMP Europe's annual Webcom event.

The third main part of Roger's activities is writing. He edited and co-wrote Transforming Organizations Through Groupware, a book of case studies on the use of Lotus Notes (publisher: Springer). He edited and was the major contributor to Adding Value through Intranet Applications (publisher: Business Intelligence) and wrote Strategic Workgroup Computing (Cambridge Market Intelligence). More recently, he edited and was the major contributor to Mastering Your Organization's Processes - A Plain Guide to BPM (Cambridge University Press).

Among his other writing is commissioned reports and white papers. Roger publishes Office Jotter, a blog on social business. He previously published and edited the newsletter Groupware News and the online magazine eComWatch, which commented on policy and trends in electronic commerce.

Roger was for several years the chairman of the British Computer Society's office automation specialist group. He set up and ran the Office of the Future Information Exchange (OFIX), which connected people interested in office automation. Roger has appeared on Dutch television speaking about teleworking and twice been interviewed on BBC Radio 4 about the Internet. For some years he was a judge for the annual Information Management awards.

When not working, Roger's spare-time interests include mud wrestling, pole-vaulting and macramé work, but never simultaneously.

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