Susan Anderson is a senior partner and co-founder of fassforward consulting group. Susan is an anthropologist with extensive experience in understanding the work that people do and applying that understanding to changing business conditions. Her work focuses on ethnography, transformation, innovation and the impact of technology on work. Susan is exceptional at taking complicated situations or abstract concepts and making them understandable and actionable in a business context.
Before joining fassforward, Susan was Senior Director of Research for Gartner, where she brought her ethnographic, design and transformation skills to bear on building the next generation Gartner.com. Susan came to Gartner from Xerox where she had spent several years advising corporate executives on virtual and work communities, knowledge sharing and brokering, next generation web and business systems as well as ways to engage with workers, users, customers and clients. Before this, Susan founded Knowledge Works, an advanced development group chartered to analyze customers and design new technologies for large, distributed organizations. When she first joined Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Susan was instrumental in developing and applying a set of collaborative, sociotechnical approaches to the transformation of work and the design of new technology.
Earlier in her career, Susan’s work emphasized change initiatives in education, health care and international development. Susan has almost 20 years of business experience and holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology. An active contributor to professional conferences and organizations, she has written on topics from technology’s role in health decision making to workplace collaboration.