She wrote the first "program" for Charles Babbage's analytical engine. Babbage conceived the idea only to perform calculations, but Lovelace saw beyond that purpose to the possibility that that first "computer" could calculate Bernoulli numbers.*
My decade-plus in the technology world has showered me with blessings. One of these is the women that have guided and inspired me. Here are a few that I want to thank profusely for their guidance, support, and inspiration:
Michelle opened the door.
Lisa illuminates just how big the world can be.
Liz inspires with her burning intelligence and amazing poise.
Cyd shows how art, spiritual, and professional life coexist.
Christina creates new worlds with her ability to reinvent herself.
Kit helps me see the practical path and how to plot my own.
Stephanie embodies true wisdom, creativity, and focus.
And, last, but not least, thanks to Mom for being completely open. Without her example, no doubt that it would be far more difficult to recognize the amazing women that surround me.
At the IA Summit this past week in Memphis, it was brought to our attention that the UX community is blessed to have so many women that actively lead our practice. I thank my lucky stars every day.
*The analytical engine was never built, but let's not blame Lovelace for the failure of the men around her.
In his 2007 TED talk, Michael Pollan discusses the arc that has taken him from his garden to his truly illuminatory set of books (from Botany of Desire to In Defense of Food) and what he has learned about our relationship with nature and our food.
Why is this here?
It reflects where we go wrong in designing our organizations. We attempt set up a system where we take people and insert them into a machine that is designed to bend their will to a strategy. There are capital inputs, information, and time. The people and technology output goods and/or services, receive the revenue, pay the bills, and take care of the customers.
This sounds great, until in practice you realize that the strategy decided on by the executive leadership loses it's effectiveness at the front lines, except for rare cases. (Southwest Airlines comes to mind here.)
Check out this key point from Pollan:
[Another TED talk on ethanol] helped me understand industrial agriculture, which of course is a Cartesian system. It's based on this idea of that we bend other species to our will, and that we are in charge, and that we create these factories, and we have these technological inputs and we get the food out of it or the fuel or whatever we want.
[tells an amazing story about the Salatin PolyFace permaculture farm] This is a different way to think about nature. And a way to get away from zero sum notion, from the Cartesian idea that nature's winning, or we're winning. Michael Pollan, The Omnivore's Next Dilemma, TED, March 2007
What Salatin does is create a situation where his animals and the grass that they graze on maximize their "desires" and, in turn, produce a truly incredible bounty of food with respect to the amount of land and the investment put into it.
The cows are not slammed into a barn, given a bunch of corn (which is not good for them), shot up with antibiotics, and fattened until they are "market-ready." Rather, they are moved from small plot to small plot, grazing on brand new delicious grass that they is there desired delicacy.
Chickens then follow them into that same plot a few days later, feed on their delicacy (fat maggots), and they defecate as they scatter the cow manure across the lot - which acts as fertilizer for the grass.
Amazingly, the grass itself contributes to this cycle. It was tall, just before the cows enter the plot. After they leave, it sheds much of it's root system (due to the root-shoot ratio). Fungi, worms, and the like digest the dead roots into new soil.
Just a few weeks later, the grass is again luxurious and tall, ready for the next cycle.
Businessfolk would do well to take a close look at these methods. We can continue to scale our organizations based on executive strategy, adding more capital and more people to execute the decisions of the central structure.
The problem with that approach is that the changing relationship of the organization to its capital and the importance of engaging your employees and customers at a more basic level (similar to meeting the desires of the cows, grass, and chickens) are changing.
My gut tells me that the answer lies in creating organizations that satisfy all the parts like Salatin's farm does. You might think of the executives as the farmer, the cows and chickens as the employees, and the grass (and animal feed) as the capital inputs. The customers are the same ones who want a Polyface chicken so badly that they drive out to the farm to pick it up. (To read more about the farm, check out the excerpt from The Omnivore's Dilemma on Mother Jones.)
Why should we care about this?
Well, as a designer, I've run into too many situations where organization were ill-suited to ingesting and assimilating what the customers and employees really need to be fully engaged. This is not a knock on any executive, manager, or employee. Rather, it's just the truth of how the information flows and responsibility distributed in most organizations today.
Through methods like mental models, we can get into the thought processes of all involved and figure out where disconnects or misunderstandings lie. I am building a practice around these models and how they can align an organization's resources and people in way most effective for both the company and the customers.
I hope you'll come back at some point as I explore these and similar issues in ways that show why such a practice is necessary and how it can be carried out.
Jeremiah Owyang, indomitable social media analyst, absolutely nails why large organizations will find it very, very difficult to allow the level of transparency and real interaction necessary to evolve their businesses (both strategy and operations) as the face of market and internal communications continues to evolve. He distinguishes three "impossible" conversations: asking for feedback, saying positive things about [their] competitors, and admitting [they] were wrong.
Asking for feedback is fine, but most organizations are not at all set up to actually listen, ingest the feedback, and decide whether or how to address the issue. Employees are at the breaking point already. "Productivity" in most organizations means employees are left with precious little time to adjust to new ideas unless they come from management or from within carefully managed feedback channels. Some employees may be able to get ahead or ignore some of their work and find ways to try new things. These mavericks should be rewarded.
Social technologies (wikis, blogs, social networks) can help, but unless they are used in concert, it's difficult to use them effectively. Imagine a symphony without a conductor where the musicians are all playing different music at the same time or, in well-run organizations, the same music to different rhythms.
Experience allows me to understand why saying positive things about [their] competitors is so difficult, but I wish there was a way to show the larger organizational consciousness why this fear is more destructive than anything. Companies use ideas from their competitors all the time, so not giving deserved kudos is paramount to denigrating many of that company's own ideas. Market results display an organization's effectiveness, so stop being afraid to show some appreciation of those with whom you share industry space.
Jeremiah makes this excellent point:
Customers aren’t stupid. In fact, they know who your competition is, and they talk amongst each other.
Most companies are not actually part of the conversation, but mostly adjacent to it. In that position, they will miss some critical piece of intelligence. Right now, the status quo might be holding, but the effort required to use the same channels for marketing, customer service, and institutional knowledge is growing. Sooner or later, this self-imposed ignorance will come back to haunt them.
Admitting [they] were wrong is difficult for everyone at turns, yet most individuals let their guards down at some point. Yes, organizations have to worry about legal culpability, but in the end they MUST learn to understand that, if they are up front and act quickly when mistakes occur, the likelihood that customers will be furious enough to sue is greatly reduced. And, if they do, then the problem hasn't been resolved.
None of these conversations are easy, nor are large organizations the only holdouts. Even individuals and small companies screw them up all the time. However, the pressures to really listen and speak honestly are becoming ever more critical to connect people both inside and outside of the organization.
Here are two sentences that capture where I am at the moment:
[O]rganizations have simply lost a sense of what it actually means to be creative. For some reason, thinking and speaking are accepted as more important work than thinking and making. Chris Conley of Gravity Tank, in discussion with Adaptive Path's Henning Fischer
Does this apply only to organizations? Looking at the amazing people that surround us, I'm struck by how much effort the design community expends in talking, blogging, and documenting every little thought and experience we have. I'm just as guilty as anyone else,* maybe more so as the things going on around us tend to set me thinking and thinking and thinking...
In the end, we are going to see some great transformations of work and life experience in the next several years. Gravity Tank is only one example of smart people having an impact far beyond the website.
Right now, I'm dedicating myself to the making part for a while and looking forward to sharing what happens to my thinking and speaking as a result. That dedication has taken the form of joining CloudRaker, an amazing design and development agency in Montreal.
Creative potential exists everywhere -- in every person, and as such in every organization -- but the current environment inhibits our ability to tease it into action. I will come out of this new experience not only re-grounded in making that happen, but also hope to do so in French. Here goes nothing!
Happy holidays to everyone.
* Yes, I know, not talking here, mostly in person. Maybe I should at least be typing. Stay tuned...
I really like this statement, as it reflects a trend that I'm seeing (and may be guilty of myself):
I think it gets reinforced by some people in the design community who make the leap from the fact that "I identify as a designer, and therefore I am a design thinker, and I can make these great strategic contributions if they’d only let me."
There’s this note of almost entitlement that has crept into the design community. That’s something I’m particularly cautious about because I think that most designers aren’t design thinkers yet because they don’t have the concrete fluency with business, and many visual designers don’t face the same constraints on actual usage that an interaction designer or industrial designer face.
As designers, we get used to exploring possibilities and finding creative solutions, but we don't necessarily ever pay the price or see the real impact of what we create.
I'm troubled by that note of entitlement, particularly from people who have added business vocabulary to their repertoire, expecting that to be enough. It's not enough. We must also take the time to truly understand what it means to make business decisions and deal every single day with the repercussions.*
There is a reason that most business conversations include a healthy dose of reality checking, namely that in business, you make a decision, see how it worked, and make another. Designers can help widen the considered field of these decisions, but we must also be willing to see the constraints and know where to push the envelope.
In some ways, the relationship between design and business is the same as that between design and technology. Design creates something; technology builds it.
These relationships work far better when there is some involvement of the builders during design (and vice versa) along with feedback once the building is complete and the result out in the ether.
This conversation is why you often hear about "accountability" in post-mortems on software projects. (In fact, I should probably label that arrow as such. Let's imagine it for a moment.)
So back to business and design. How do they relate to the design/build discussion? Well, instead of just being told what to design:
Designers want input into the possible solutions to a problem.
We need to learn to talk to each other better to make this work.
At the IIT Strategy Conference (link from bplusd), Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management in Toronto, gave a great talk about the approaches based on validity (design) versus reliability (business). He covers both what both designers and businesspeople can do to smooth communication and, therefore, benefit from a better working relationship.
Schauer illustrates just how that might work with this anecdote from a recent project:
We helped identify key metrics that people actually cared about that the web and the interactive marketing group could actually impact, and how can we calculate the impact that a potential project could have on those numbers. Suddenly, they are having this financial dialog, when before they were just talking about personas or user flows and things like that. So that really changed their relationship with the rest of the organization by being able to think through and articulate things in a way that was valued.
Don't you want to have that same relationship with your colleagues, regardless of your perspective? We would all benefit from it.
Check out the full interview, which includes many ways designers can get smarter about business.
Though quiet the blog front be for me, the words flow ever more. Trust that, when I've something to say, it will appear in this exact space. If you catch me in person, I'll talk your ear off, to be sure.
Portland was lovely, thank you very much. WebVisions plays mellower than the IA Summit, which I appreciated with my need to keep my mind on my presentation and enjoy my Portland friends.
Jeremiah Owyang of Web-strategist.com and Podtech caught me in the hallway at the Portland Convention Center to ask me a few questions about how corporate managers can understand and leverage IAs in their work.
Dissecting Big and Little IA on the fly was not an easy feat, but I enjoyed the conversation and the challenge. Thanks, Jeremiah!
Also, Jaman continues to sprout happily. Over the last couple releases, we've made huge upgrades to the software, website, and the movie catalog. For those foreign film fans out there, look for many familiar classic and provocative movies coming online shortly. For more about Jaman and what we're attempting, see me blab further about Jaman on Lunchmeet.
Also, Boxes & Arrows hums along quite well. I generally act behind the curtain there, but plan on occasion to emerge with an article or two over the next few months.
So, that's my story for now. Feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you're up to.
Back in minor self-promotion mode, I'll be speaking at WebVisions in Portland, May 3-4 on the how technology allows (or makes!) us step out of our comfort zone to follow our ideas into new places, connect with people with whom we can make them happen, and find real innovation in spite of the cynicism and inertia of entrenched institutions.
I got the idea for this talk after seeing many friends going into business for themselves, hearing folks speak of such paths at the IA Summit, including Joshua Prince-Ramus amazing architecture projects. At WebVisions, I'll zoom out to explore what this might mean not only for Web professionals, but for the petri dishes of change (buzzword: innovation) in many facets of our lives.
This is a conference that I've heard good things about previously, but this will be my first time attending. The lineup is an incredible mix of designers, coders, entrepreneurs, and strategists (too many to detail here). One talk I'll be watching closely is David Pescovitz' (of BoingBoing fame) thought about how info overload will be conquered. That intrigues me to no end.
If you're going to be in Portland for WV, let me know!
So as I noted a couple of posts ago, this year has gotten off to a very interesting start. First the articles on Boxes & Arrows and the IA Summit precon took things in a new direction, now film festival season rejuvenates the batteries.
Along the way, another huge opportunity came a-knockin'. Liz Danzico the Great has handed over the B&A Editor-in-Chief reigns to me, with Christina making the official announcement during 3-minute Madness at the Summit. Thanks, Christina, for trusting me with your baby.
Finally, a bit more attention will be paid to how this blog communicates what I'm thinking. Those of you who know me well probably laugh at my posting frequency, as it's basically a minute fraction of my brain cycles. However, even those folks know that I'm quite considerate in my attempts to keep from creating noise. When I have something to say, I'll continue to show up.
Taking a look at the postings I've been making and in recognition of these new currents, I'm making a small change to the blog title - from User eXperience to eXperience. Minutiae to be sure, but I feel better about that electronic visage. I still love the users, but I'm more interested in these days about the whole enchilada of relationships we need in our lives.
My experience tells me that by facing just that one way (towards customers), user experience professionals do a disservice to the environments we want to help create -- where we discern how the web of relationships affects everyone involved, whether direct or indirect.
This little change nods to where I'm going. Shall we?
What will you do with the influence that you have collected over the last couple of years? Some people are doing greatthings, obviously.
Dan's lament is right on the mark, however. Have we stopped teaching designers to do? How can we design great products when we don't have the people to do the work with us?
And my concern not only applies to designers. I worry that in our ever-expanding information and opportunity space, we have misplaced the ability to discern and focus on real problems. As a cynical optimist, I remain hopeful, but cautious.
I have been somewhat remiss in not mentioning a couple of things that I've been working on with my friend and colleague, Jeff Lash.
Jeff and I, both UXers now in product management roles, have been busy over the last several weeks on two projects for others considering whether the move is right for them:
Boxes & Arrows articles on Transitioning from User Experience to Product Management (Part 1, Part 2), already published. There's been a good bit of discussion around Part 1, and it's getting started on Part 2 (just published yesterday).
IA Summit 2007 Pre-conference session, So You Wanna Be a Product Manager..., scheduled for the afternoon of Thursday, March 22. The session will be much more than a boring rehash of the article with Q&A. If you're going to be at the Summit, come join us!
In A Whole New Mind, Dan Pink discusses the transformation of the worker from left-brain focus to a more balanced approach. He also discusses at length the transition from the "Information Age" to the "Conceptual Age." His arguments are interesting, but what about organizations? Won't they have to change as they become populated by people with different skills and approaches?
As I read the transcript of a discussion between Jesse James Garrett and Lou Carbone, I see where an answer to these questions might be forming:
When you look at the organizations of the past, [they were like] bus drivers driving buses along the prescribed route, [with a] certain number of stops to make and doing the same routine over and over again. And the customer really came along for the ride. Today, [when it comes to] doing business, the model is considerably more like taxis. We're not even sure what the customer needs until the customer communicates [it to us] and we can anticipate what they want. Then what we end up doing is snapping together a set of capabilities to deliver the experience that they want. And that's very, very different.
Excellent analogy, Lou. I really hope that at some point this transformation that can happen. The interim might be very painful.
So Gizmodo might want to think a bit about why Apple would enrich network executives by paying them well for licensing their TV series for download through iTunes.
The movie studios resist, and Jobs can't be on the board everywhere.
Some of you know that my quiet has not been for lack of happenings. The main thrust of which is that I'm now in the online video industry, rather than the financial services.
I want to know when someone at the top of the branding groups in one of these companies is going to get wind of this free brainstorming and take a lesson.
The question isn't really who will adopt these explorations, though the NFL logo above "illustrates" that a little creativity can go a long way. With a little work, that already screen-friendly logo could be print-ready and on NFL stationery in no time.
Companies are constantly "rethinking their brands" to remain relevant. As Yay Hooray demonstrates this morning, lots of folks out there play around with this stuff over their breakfast. Young, tech-savvy folks. Right smack dab in the middle of your company's key demographic.
Yes, marketers. Your target markets can provide input, too. Get in a conversation with them, gain their loyalty, and they will help you succeed. Mostly for free!!
Stop hamstringing your creatives with design-by-committee and let them work with your customers to create a "living" brand. Giving up a little control will help you stay relevant in the quickly-changing marketplace.
* No problem resisting the temptation to say that they are "Web 2.o-ing" the logos. I have my pride.
1. NFL and the NFL shield design are registered trademarks of the National Football League.
2. Tenkai designed NFL 2.0, but gets his/her satisfaction from the imaginative exercise. S/he leaves no identifying information. Well done.
SXSW and the IA Summit must have given everyone a hangover. On Technorati, there are barely 3 pages of blog entries about Flickrites Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake appearing on the cover of Newsweek!
Now, your reaction may be that this is just a confirmation of the bubble. Be such a cynic at your own risk. My mom reads this magazine back in St. Louis, and now she might finally understand what I do!
Now, I won't say, "This is the best story ever!" It's ok, but gives too much space to myspace and the hangers-on that are trying to capitalize on exactly the same idea. BORING!
However, the story is a good intro for neophytes and indicates that there is a growing acceptance past the technorati that the Web isn't just for breakfast anymore. The highlight of the story is this nugget about 3/4ths of the way through:
Flickr was a good business, too, as many users chose to pay the $25-a-year fee for unlimited photo storage and relief from advertising on the site. But that's not why Yahoo bought it for an estimated $35 million. "With less than 10 people on the payroll, they had millions of users generating content, millions of users organizing that content for them, tens of thousands of users distributing that across the Internet, and thousands of people not on the payroll actually building the thing," says Yahoo exec Bradley Horowitz. "That's a neat trick. If we could do that same thing with Yahoo, and take our half-billion user base and achieve the same kind of effect, we knew we were on to something." The New Wisdom of the Web, Newsweek, April 3, 2006
What a great paragraph! Look at the business realities that this highlights:
Little capital, lots of revenue: a small number of users paying for a service can generate outsized revenues (especially per employee).
Goodbye command center and call center: A small number of people (10 in Flickr's case) can run and provide service for a site that supports millions of people.
Participation is good business: get users to help you build the community.
These scale issues highlight the challenges for businesses today. The vaunted barriers to entry are crumbling. I'm interested to see if some of the small companies take some of their capital and try to take on larger players in the market. I'm thinking something like Flickr buying a camera manufacturer or myspace buying a mall complex to create. That's a stretch, but it's fun to consider.
On the flip side, imagine a large company whose financial ratios start looking more like Flickr's than GM's!
Thus far, Amazon, Yahoo, and Google look like they have realistic shots at making something magical happen. IBM looks like it wants a piece, too. I'm skeptical about the latter.
Plenty of companies talk a good game, but how many of the business leaders you know or see on the news truly understand how deeply these upstarts are connecting with their customers? Or even have the time to really observer their customers?
The big question is: how can we show the teeming masses of Ford Excursion-sized companies that they too can create great products and actually get real participation from their customers?
Aside: It's fun to think of an economy built of companies like Flickr, 37signals, myspace, etc. The idea borders on ridiculous, true, and I seriously doubt that anyone really wants to go through the macroeconomic devastation that would come with the collapse of the large enterprise economy.
So I asked what made myspace so compelling... why didn't she fall in love with LiveJournal? Her answer is a lesson for software developers (especially Web 2.0-ers), and was a theme of SXSW:
"myspace keeps doing what everybody really wants, and it happens instantly."
She said they respond to feedback, "As soon as you think of something, it's in there."
--------
Then she said the weirdest thing of all: "myspace is like a whole new plane of existence." She wasn't kidding.
Going on to explain that Threadless and 37Signals are proponents of the approach, Sierra seems to get a little carried away with her post SXSW brainwave hangover.* Herein lies an assumption that adding instantaneously to the functionality equals rabid user loyalty.
Au contraire. Reality is slightly more mundane, but no less powerful. By starting small and building piece-by-piece, these sites actually know their users well enough to observe activity and add in small additions that follow naturally what their users seek.
There's even a danger inherent in following the crowd so closely, especially in social software. The engaged masses can help you spark their fickle bomb and derail your quickly growing organism.
You might say that myspace and 37Signals have gotten lucky so far by not tripping too badly. Or, you're seeing excellent "generalists" showing both their user research, product manager, and design skills on their small, dedicated user base.
Hourly/daily releases are not prerequisites to creating the kind of passion. Do your homework (user research, activity monitoring), then pick the things that will have the most impact and focus like a laser on those things. I'd argue that inability to prioritize is the bane of most organizations and projects, both on the web and off.
That's the real motivator here - if you ask for feedback and generate interesting solutions to problems and new ideas, your users trust you more to deliver what they need and have less time to become disillusioned. The cycle feeds upon itself. More trust, less opportunity for problems, more help to keep on the track, MORE trust, LESS problems, MORE help, and so on.
Make progress, and the users will even cut you some slack if there is a missed step.
One thing: most situations call for release frequency based on best effort. Most websites can reasonably release new functionality or fixes a few times a month or more. A sports team usually has to wait until the season is over to make significant changes in your gameday experiences. Large public works projects can take several years.
Should you follow the wrong path, you will go the way of Friendster. Get buzz, have the attention of a rabid set of users, then off the rails you go!
* I can relate. I'm still drawing flux capacitors all over the place after returning from Vancouver. More on that in several upcoming posts.
Hello there, stalwarts! I haven't disappeared. Just letting some new ideas percolate.
As a humorous aside, take Khoi Vihn's excellent description of travel to SXSW Interactive last week:
My outbound flight, from John F. Kennedy International Airport to Austin, TX, was practically a Gen-X school bus, loaded with twenty-five to thirty-five year old media professionals wearing hipster glasses and expensive jeans. The woman seated next to me swore we had been seated in order of the model of iPod we carried.
I'm off to the IA Summit next week. While it may not have quite the cachet of SXSW, it was one of my 2005 highlights. I fully expect it to light the fuse in my head to spark the deluge. Watch out.
On a flight from New York to San Francisco, I had the lately-rare opportunity to actually sit and read a magazine. The February 2006 issue of Wired tagged along for the ride, and inside crouched an opinion column about the Sony DRM debacle (by Bruce Sterling) and the cover story revealing Lego’s embrace of an ubercustomer group that helped jumpstart their product development.
Until recently, companies were skittish about customer innovation, fearing that outsiders might leak technical secrest or that they simply lacked the necessary technical skills. But Lego warmed to the open source ethos. It’s clear to the Lego execs that Mindstorms NXT would be a lesser product without the MUPers’ (spell out) input.
Inviting customers to innovate isn’t just about building better products. Opening the process engenders goodwill and creates buzz among the zealots, a critical asset for products that rely on word-of-mouth evangelism. Geeks in Toyland, Wired 14.02
Great point, to be sure, but what product doesn’t rely on WOM these days? With falling effectiveness of traditional media marketing and ever-increasing competition for customer’s attention (online and off), the best chance at (continuing) success is to engage customers in R&D efforts.
In contrast, Sony responded to their fear of piracy by black-boxing their offering and adding what amounts to spyware on their users machines. Great idea, Sony, wreck our computers. That’s the way to inspire trust in your dedication to the customer.
Why not come up with ways to see where your music is popping up and use the info to sign and distribute new and more artists?
Lego’s approach represents the antithesis of this attitude. Responding to the reverse engineering of their proprietary Mindstorms robot control code, they opened up their software licensing agreement to include a “right to hack."
Much like Firefox, this turns some of your best, most technically adept customers from potential competitors into partners-in-crime. Do you think Firefox would have ever been built if MSFT built the original IE code, let it loose on the world, then continued to cherry pick the best ideas and write them into the software? No way, instead, people would be writing extensions and plugins for IE.
In the end, this approach embraces your customers. If you can be trusted, they will protect your products at the same time they drive you mercilessly to keep up with their ideas. In the end, letting go of this control focuses your development efforts and helps you invest in the right opportunities.
Even if these challengers seem like gnats to the SAPs and OracleSofts of the world, they should mind that buzz. Just like Basecamp and Writely versus to the MicroSoft dynasty, the threat looms small right now.
Still, these threats grow over time. Remember that one year ago, Firefox was barely a blip on the IE radar, now it's at least a fearsome wasp. The OS market has proven somewhat harder to crack, though Linux and Mac both have made inroads lately, though for different reasons.
These markets share the same trend - lowering barriers to entry. For a long while, the only choice for an enterprise would be suites of enterprise software and personal machines running the MicroSoft suite. Especially in the enterprise world, the products have not been built to enable users to actually get their work done, rather features and capabilities are created to satisfy the corporate purchasing managers.
To those who have to use and support this software, the situation looks like this:
Too many features
Hard to use
Harder to support
Difficult and resource-intensive to alter/add features*
The new players are attacking the problems of users with a "low-hanging fruit" approach. They make certain tasks, such a simple collaboration (Basecamp, Writely), CRM (Salesforce.com), and enterprise services administration (Rearden Commerce) easy for end users, business owners, and IT support.
Give user just what they need
Easy to use
Easy to support - right now mostly hosted, but there is no reason that they can't be installed (Google Search Appliance, anyone?).
Simple to customize/add features*
When I read Peter's post, it reminded me of an incredibly interesting Supernova 2005 podcast of a presentation by US Navy Commander Greg Glaros from the Office of Force Transformation, formed:
Because our business model was broken, our methods of waging war were inadequate, and the enemy was out-adapting us.
He goes on to discuss that the Armed Forces are trying new ways to solve some of the same challenges that many organizations face: new operational tactics, managing information and communication, navigating organizational hierarchies, and dealing with an entrenched and sometimes rigid organizational structures.
In this case, it looks like government is recognizing its vulnerability before the private sector.
Organizations of all sizes are going to have to learn how to adapt and change more quickly. As the infoglut continues, new packaging and splashier marketing campaigns will have less and less effect on the success of products and services.
Senior managers must put decision-making power and information into the hands of the line-level employees and encourage two-way communication at all levels, or a more nimble, savvy competitor will take advantage of their vulnerability. Maybe the carnage won't be as gruesome as Commander Glaros' new approaches are designed to avoid, but it will be ugly.
The thing that bugs me is that all the drama is unnecessary. The tussles would be more interesting if all the players were nimble and clever.
* Salesforce.com provides a special development platform, and I believe that Rearden is planning on offering the same at some point in the near future. Peter also talks about how Adaptive Path and Seed Magazine have modified Moveable Type as an alternative to traditional CMS platforms. Pretty powerful stuff.
With experience in companies large and small, Chris obsesses about how design, organizational culture, vision, and customers interact.
He is creating a consulting practice that combines decade of experience as an Experience Strategist, Information Architect, and Product Manager, all of which are about understanding, explaining, and smoothing the differences in perspective between people.
Chris is also the Editor-in-Chief of the leading online design magazine Boxes and Arrows.
An Ode to Women in Technology
