About Craig L. Roth

Mr. Roth is a Vice President and Senior Industry Analyst (see What is an Industry Analyst) at Burton Group. He joined Burton Group in 2006 to launch its Collaboration and Content Strategies service, for which he remains service director, and oversaw its increase to a multi-million dollar business. Prior to Burton Group Mr. Roth was a Vice President and Industry Analyst for the META Group (now part of Gartner Group). He has worked with hundreds of large organizations to identify and eliminate barriers to efficient adoption of technology, particularly with regard to the Web and Knowledge Infrastructure.

Areas of Expertise

• Web technology and its strategic impact on business strategy:
  • Governance
  • Web Architecture
  • Collaboration business cases and ROI

• Knowledge Infrastructure and how it is leveraged by best practice organizations:
  • Enterprise Portals
  • Enterprise Attention Management (Mr. Roth coined the EAM term and defined this space) and Information Overload
  • Microsoft SharePoint
  • Collaboration

Industry Expertise and Influence

Mr. Roth has been quoted as an industry expert in sources such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, eWeek, Network World, Business Week, ComputerWeekly, InformationWeek, Forbes, CIO Magazine, ComputerWorld, and National Public Radio.

Mr. Roth, author of the KnowledgeForward blog, was rated as a top 100 analyst blogger by Technobabble 2.0.

Trusted Advisor and Consultant

As a trusted advisor, Mr. Roth has worked with over 200 large corporations and government agencies on strategic topics such as business case creation, organizational structure, and technology adoption strategy.

As a marketing strategy consultant, he provided advice and guidance on marketing strategy to software vendors including competitive comparisons and recommendations on messaging, pricing, packaging, and functionality prioritization.

As a management consultant, Mr. Roth spent four months onsite at a major insurance company as part of a team helping to create a unified plan and strategy for all the technology projects in the Property and Casulty division.

Writing

Written work includes over 160 papers on technology trends, best practices, and market analysis for Burton Group and the META Group as well as articles for Enterprise NT Magazine and .NET Magazine.

Public Speaking

In addition to being a keynote and executive speaker for Burton Group and META Group, Mr. Roth has given keynote addresses at events by SAP (Argentina), Domino/Notes User Group (Germany), Microsoft (daily keynote at worldwide sales conference), and InfoWeek (5 city U.S. tour) and spoken at many other international events.

Training

Mr. Roth has created and presented many one and two-day workshops to provide in-depth instruction in topics including Comparing Microsoft and IBM's Collaboration Portfolios, SharePoint Governance and Planning, Customer Relationship Management Technology, and Web Architecture.

Skills

Mr. Roth has a proven ability to:

• Quickly scope and disaggregate complex problems, and recommend strategic and tactical solutions
• Synthesize concise knowledge from a wide range of information, provide insight, and pinpoint practical implications under tight deadlines
• Serve as a thought partner, who can both engage in team problem solving and contribute to knowledge creation initiatives

Previous Experience

Industry analyst: META Group, 7 years. Vice President and Industry Analyst, Integration and Development Strategies; Content and Collaboration Strategies

Corporate: Discover Card, 8 years. Manager of Advanced Technology Applications. Also held positions as Programmer and Project Manager

Entrepreneurial: Horizon Group, 5 years. Started software gaming company that produced two successful products that were distributed internationally through Electronic Arts

Volunteer: Helped Community Service Options, an advocacy group for the disabled, to set up update procedures for their website and enhance their design

Education

MBA (Marketing and Economics), University of Chicago

B.S. (Business), Indiana University

Other Interests

Tennis, composing music, chess, woodworking, cycling

"Craig Roth has consistently ranked as a top 10 analyst based on influence and exposure within the web services and portal marketplaces"

Christopher R. Wilder
Executive Vice President
The Knowledge Capital Group Inc. (an independent analyst watchdog and rating firm)