Archive for May 2007


Moving Beyond Reactive IT Strategy With User Experience

May 9th, 2007 — 12:00am

For those in the enterprise IA / UX space, The next frontier in IT strategy: A McKinsey Survey centered on the idea that “…IT strategy is maturing from a reactive to a proactive stance”is worth a look.

This nicely parallels a point made about the reactive mindset common to IT in many large organizations, in discussion on the IAI mailing list last month. Lou Rosenfeld’s post Information architects on communicating to IT managers, summarizes the original discussion in the IAI thread, and is worth reading as a companion piece.

Lou’s summary of information architecture and user experience voices in the enterprise arena is noteworthy for including many examples of strong correspondence between McKinsey’s understanding of how IT strategy will mature (a traditional management consulting view), and the collected IA / UX viewpoints on addressing IT leadership – typical buyers for enterprise anything – and innovation.

Dialogs that show convergence of understanding like this serve as positive signs for the future. At present, a large set of deeply rooted cultural assumptions (at their best inaccurate, usually reductive, sometimes even damaging) about the roles of IT, business, and design combine with the historical legacies of corporate structures to needlessly limit what’s possible for User Experience and IA in the enterprise landscape. In practical terms, I’m thinking of those limitations as barriers to the strategy table; constraining who can talk to who, and about which important topics, such as how to spend money, and where the business should go.
Considering the gulf that separated UX and IT viewpoints ten – or even five – years ago, this kind of emerging common understanding is a good sign that the cultural obstacles to a holistic view of the modern enterprise are waning. We know that a holistic view will rely on deep understanding of the user experience aspects of business at all levels to support innovation in products and services. I’m hoping the rest of the players come to understand this soon.

Another good sign is that CIO’s have won a seat at the strategy table, after consistent effort:

Further evidence of IT’s collaborative role in shaping business strategy is the fact that so many CIOs now have a seat at the table with senior management. They report to the CEO in 44 percent of all cases; an additional 42 percent report to either the chief operating officer or the chief financial officer.

Looking ahead, information architecture and user experience viewpoints and practitioners should work toward a similar growth path. We fill a critical and missing strategic role that other traditional viewpoints are not as well positioned to supply.

Quoting McKinsey again:

IT strategy in most companies has not yet reached its full potential, which in our experience involves exploiting innovation to drive constant improvement in the operations of a business and to give it a real advantage over competitors with new products and capabilities. Fewer than two-thirds of the survey respondents say that technological innovation shapes their strategy. Only 43 percent say they are either very or extremely effective at identifying areas where IT can add the most value.

User Experience can and should have a leading voice in setting the agenda for innovation, and shaping understandings of where IT and other groups can add the most value in the enterprise. To this end, I’ll quote Peter Merholz (with apologies for not asking in advance):

“…we’ve reached a point where we’ve maximized efficiency until we can’t maximize no more, and that in order to realize new top-line value, we need to innovate… And right now, innovations are coming from engaging with the experiences people want to have and satisfying *that*.”

McKinsey isn’t making the connection between strategic user experience perspectives and innovation – at least not yet. That’s most likely a consequence of the fact that management consulting firms base their own ways of thinking, organizational models, and product offerings (services, intellectual property, etc.) on addressing buyers who are themselves deeply entrenched in traditional corporate structures and worldviews. And in those worlds, everything is far from miscellaneous, as a glance at the category options available demonstrates; your menu here includes Corporate Finance, Information Technology, Marketing, Operations, Strategy…

BTW: if you weren’t convinced already, this should demonstrate the value of the $40 IAI annual membership fee, or of simply reading Bloug, which is free, over paying for subscriptions to management journals :)

Comment » | Customer Experiences, Enterprise, Information Architecture, User Experience (UX)

Photoshop And Knowledge War in Iraq

May 7th, 2007 — 12:00am

Direct connections between the war in Iraq and the realm of user experience are rare, so I was surprised when one popped up today in an article by the New York Times, titled 2 Car Bombings in Iraq Kill 25.

The article quotes an Iraqi, reacting to the destruction of a house containing a cache of munitions by American soldiers.  “The Americans are lying,” said Ali Jabbar, 28, one of several men digging through the rubble, where bicycle handlebars could be seen poking out. “If there were weapons there, they should have taken pictures to prove it.” But in a sign of the challenge Americans face here, Mr. Jabbar said that even if he saw such pictures, he would not be convinced that the destruction was justified. “The Americans can make it up with Photoshop,” he said.

It’s simultaneously terrible and fascinating that a tool I use regularly would appear in this sort of context. And yet it’s not unreasonable, given the ways that many futurists envision and describe warfare centered on information.

Here’s Alvin Toffler, from How will future wars be fought?

Above all, the full implications of what we termed Third Wave “knowledge warfare” have not yet been digested – even in the United States. The wars of the future will increasingly be prevented, won or lost based on information superiority and dominance. And that isn’t just a matter of taking out the other guy’s radar. It means waging the kind of full-scale cyber-war we described in War and Anti-War. Cyber-war involves everything from strategic deception and perception management down to tactical disruption of an adversary’s information systems. It also means understanding the role played by the global media in any conflict today. It means enhancing all your knowledge assets from intelligence, to research and development, training, and communication.

Comment » | The Media Environment, Tools, User Experience (UX)

Watching Ideas Bloom: Text Clouds of the Republican Debate At Democrats.org

May 4th, 2007 — 12:00am

A meme is emerging for the use text clouds as visualization for – and a source of insight into – political speeches and speakers.
Text clouds of the Republican Presidential candidates’ debate appear front and center on the DNC blog democrats.org, in Tag Clouds Can Tell Us a Lot…. (sourced from media analysis firm Upstream Analysis via Pollster.com).
GiulianiTag400.png
BrownbackTag400.png
As you can see in the quote from the writeup below, we’re quickly developing sophisticated readings of the (comparatively) simple visualization methods used to generate text clouds.

But sometimes a cloud also reflects concerns that voters share about a candidate. This is because the candidate gets asked about the issue–a lot–and then has to talk about it.

Check out the large “Pro-Life” tag in flip-flopping Romney’s cloud, or the large “Think” tag in Giuliani’s cloud–the candidate notorious for leaping first and thinking later.

Political interpretations aside, this is a nuanced reading of the resulting clouds: it recognizes the dynamic feedback link between intentions and responses that becomes visible in the rendered clouds. For a visualization geek, these clouds show the differing agendas of candidates and audience as they played out, a nice example of social mechanisms in action.

Note to the tool builders of the world

How about putting together a visualization toolset that shows evolving text clouds as the debate progresses? I’m imagining a timeline plus transcript plus cloud view of the accumulating text cloud for each candidate, with options for moving forward or back in the stream of words.

What could be better than watching words and ideas bloom over time, the same way we see flowers in a garden blossom, open, and close in time lapse photography. I’d like to think we can grow something poetic and beautiful, as well as useful, from the (sadly debased) soil of politicized sound bites surrounding us.

Or, with a nod to the brutal competition built into most natural systems, you may choose to watch the struggle of waterlillies for sunlight, in this clip from The Amazing Life of Plants.

Comment » | Tag Clouds

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