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Designers interested in the new challenges of ubiquitous computing / ubicomp, ethics, and the future of integrated experiences will enjoy Improving Our Ethical Choices: Managing the Imp of the Perverse, published in UXMatters on September 8th.

Ranging from Baudelaire to the Big Chill, with Edgar Allen Poe as guiding spirit, this fourth and final installment of the Designing Ethical Experiences series written for UXMatters provides practical suggestions – drawn mostly from business, psychology, and ethics researchers – on how to balance the tensions of difficult design choices. We’re not all philosophers, so as always the focus is on insights into how we make all types of decisions, not simply ethical dilemmas.

Aligning The Decision Cycle

Here’s an excerpt:

Ethical fading, the tension between our Want and Should Selves, and our natural tendency to create juicy rationalizations are powerful obstacles to the making of ethical design choices. As UX professionals, how can we better align our Want and Should Selves, ensuring that we create ethical experiences?

I learned a great deal about myself and my outlook while researching and writing this series of articles. I hope readers find the insights and tools valuable; either directly as a resource for dealing with ethical challenges of the new integrated experiences, or more generally during the day to day ebb and flow of design work.

In The next frontiers for Design and User Experience Jess McMullin offers:

I believe that the opportunity for design and user experience to increase our influence is not about finding better methods for working with users, but in better methods for working with business. Not that new methods for generating insight, prototyping, and defining solutions aren’t useful. But that’s not where the real barriers are in my practice. The real barriers are about building consensus, buy-in, bridging competing viewpoints, and actually executing. In that environment, we need to cultivate business fluency, and use our design toolkit to work with stakeholders, not just customers.

This a solid assessment of the obstacles design and user experience face, and sound advice on how to increase the influence our discipline commands. Thinking pragmatically, the business has power and money, making it essential for design to “cultivate business fluency”.

It’s important to build on this sound advice, and understand that to be well-positioned for the long term, design and user experience must recognize that new economic and cultural production models – commons-based, open source, networked / collaborative, and likely others yet to be seen – blur the formerly sharp distinctions between businesses and users / customers, and consequently open new roles and channels of influence for design.

This blurring is most visible in sectors of the economy such as software and media, but is also happening in other sectors as well, and even for services traditionally seen as the responsibility of the producer. The balance of power is changing. Though far from outright demolition, the old high ramparts dividing production processes from consumption are showing some wear.

This blurring (convergence might be a better (albeit overused…) word) means business also has clear and increasing incentive to cultivate design fluency. User experience, and other disciplines oriented toward understanding and working with – even working for – users and customers are essential for survival and success in these new economic and cultural production models.

One outcome of this convergence of methods, frames, and approaches might be, as Janko Roettgers suggests, using a combination of business and design perspectives to prototype a business, instead of just the products and experiences that are traditionally seen as the touch points or interfaces connecting businesses with customers.

To close the loop, design and user experience should indeed cultivate business fluency, but also keep in mind that those things which make design different from business – such as core approaches, frames, and methods – will remain critical to insuring the value of user experience in the future. Good examples of these differences, as Peter Morville recently suggested, are the holistic perspectives and techniques that help design and user experience imagine and describe the future.

What could be more influential than defining the future?

Finally, what does this future look like? Open design may be an early example of a new model and approach to economic and cultural production, one that was both conceived with the aid of, and also structured to rely upon, design and user experience perspectives.

A few months ago I came across a presentation titled Organizations in Crisis and Decline, by Randall Dunham. After giving examples of organizations in crisis and decline that include Kmart, General Motors, United Airlines, and Michael Jackson. (interesting example of an enterprise…), Dunham goes on to summarize typical symptoms of crisis, the strategic consequences of decline, and 10 behaviors of unhealthy organizations.

I came across this while doing some research on how the structures and cultures of organizations influence modes of thinking, resilience, and decision making, so this is related to some of my postings on enterprise software. It might be a while before I have the chance to write up all the ideas, so I’ll share Dunham’s material now.

Why is this of note to IAs? Quite a few Information architects (practitioners, not just those with the title…) are actively looking for effective tools and modes of understanding to help frame and manage enterprise problems.

Understanding the signs of decline and crisis in organizations can help information architects and other change agents understand the environmental context of a situation in the critical early stages of setting expectations and roles, and before it’s “too late”, when everyone at the management table has strong opinions they must defend. In other words, before making a leap is into an active project, a planning and budgeting cycle, a strategic vision session, etc.

I see (at least) two very important aspects of a situation that Dunham’s warning signs could help identify; how healthy an organization is, and what latitude for activity and change is available. Building on this, these criteria can help identify situations to avoid or be wary of. Of course, organizations in crisis and decline can present opportunities as well as risks, but sometimes the ship is going down no matter how much you try to patch the holes…

For those without powerpoint, I’m going to present some of the material here as text, with acknowledgment that I’m borrowing directly from Dunham, who himself credits this source: Mische, M.A. (2001). Ten warning signs of strategic Decline. In Strategic Renewal: Becoming a High-Performance Organization (pp. 25-30). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Typical Symptoms of Crisis/Decline

• Lower earnings & revenues
• Increased employee turnover
• Reduced market presence
• Decrease in customer satisfaction & interest
• Increasing costs & high structural costs

Strategic Consequences of Crisis/Decline

• Lower market value
• Inconsistent strategies
• Misalignment of internal strategies & external goals
• Diminished capacity to attract top talent
• Increased vulnerability

10 Behaviors that Signal Decline

• The organization exhibits a lack of understanding the environmental and economic realities confronting it, or is in denial
• The management of the organization is arrogant with regard to its view of the world & assessment of its internal competencies. Ex: Icarus Paradox
• The organization has lost perspective with respect to customers, products, suppliers, and competitors
• Management and employees have an insular focus or preoccupation with internal processes, internal measurements, and politics
• The organization has lost its sense of urgency and lacks an attitude of self-determination
• The organization is relying on historical and poorly conceptualized or inappropriate business strategies and traditional management methods to address new & different challenges
• The organization has the propensity to repeat mistakes and fails to learn from past experiences
• The organization has low or slow innovation practices and is late to market with new products/services
• The organization has a tendency to recycle marginally performing managers
• The organization relies exclusively on internal talent as a source of leadership

Key Factors that Contribute to Decline

• Age of the organization: Older, more established firms may rely on legacy practices
• Size of the organization: Large firms with many vertical levels can have trouble adapting
• Financial success and past performance: Past success can lead to desire to follow same path in hopes of future success
• Ownership and equity structure: Is there accountability at all times to outside agents?
• Environmental influences: External shocks
• Ability to learn and discern patterns: Lack of learning organization culture
• Certainty/uncertainty: Effectiveness of change management
• Leadership: Young & inexperienced without desire to learn

Success Can Drive Crisis

• The same processes that lead to success in an organization can also lead to failure
• This is because success promotes rigidity, resistance to change, and habitual response
• Biggest problem – people learn the ‘right’ way to solve a problem and do that over and over again, even if that way will no longer solve the problem

It’s true these are quite general. Naturally, the art is in knowing how to apply them as criteria, or interperet what you found. As a quick test of accuracy, I’ve used the behaviors and warning signs to retrospectively review several of the organizations I’ve seen from the inside. When those organizations showed several of the behaviors and warning signs at an aggregate level (not necessarily my group, but the whole enterprise) then the strategic consequence dunham mentioned were visible at the same time.

From a practical perspective, a rating scale or some indicators of relative degree would be very useful. In order to gauge whether to stay or go, you need to understand the intensity of the decline or crisis and what action you can take: for example, do you have time to go back to the cabin to save your handwritten screenplay before the ship sinks?

This weekend, some of my earlier posts discussing the user experience of Lotus Notes surfaced in the Notes community. Ed Brill – in a posting titled Mary Beth has been taking on the critics – referenced my mention of how the head of the Notes UI team was employing user research as a bridge to customers. Ed complimented the design team for reaching out to critics in public. This is a well-deserved pat on the back. Yet it falls short of recognizing the more important point that direct user research should be a basic component of any company’s overall strategy and planning for long term success (or survival).

Why? User research helps build customer relationships, further design efforts, and identify new business opportunities when applied across audiences (internal and external constituencies) and perspectives (marketing, sales, product development), and with an eye for needs beyond immediate feedback. This sort of engagement with customers of a software product (or any kind of product) should *not* be special or noteworthy – it should happen all the time. Continuously. I’m thinking of Jared Spool’s remarks during his keynote at UI10, to the effect that the user experience perspective is most successful when it it is a basic component of a company’s culture, and thus an assumed aspect of every initiative.

In fact, in a socially transparent, networked, and aware environment like the current FuturePresent, user research serves as a fundamental, indispensable form of research and development that companies and organizations must support as part of their portfolio of methods for seeking broad based environmental feedback (also here). I’ll go so far as to say that user research may move beyond the realm of essential corporate R&D, and qualify as genuine basic research.

BTW: maybe it’s just me, but isn’t it a bit ominous that the tag line for Notes 7 is “Innovate. Collaborate. Dominate.” ? Sounds like something the Borg might say if you asked them how to make breakfast…

In the same way that information architecture helps take users’ understandings of the structure, meaning, and organization of information into account at the level of domain-specific user experiences, information spaces, and systems, the complex semantic boundaries and relationships that define and link enterprise-level domains is a natural area of activity for enterprise information architecture.
Looking for some technically oriented materials related to this level of IA – what I call enterprise semantic frameworks – I came across a solid article titled Enterprise Semantics: Aligning Service-Oriented Architecture with the Business in the Web Services Journal.
The authors – Joram Borenstein and Joshua Fox – take a web-services perspective on the business benefits of enterprise-level semantic efforts, but they do a good job of laying out the case for the importance of semantic concepts, understanding, and alignment at the enterprise level.
From the article abtract:
“Enterprises need transparency, a clear view of what is happening in the organization. They also need agility, which is the ability to respond quickly to changes in the internal and external environments. Finally, organizations require integration: the smooth interoperation of applications across organizational boundaries. Encoding business concepts in a formal semantic model helps to achieve these goals and also results in additional corollary benefits. This semantic model serves as a focal point and enables automated discovery and transformation services in an organization.”
They also offer some references at the conclusion of the article:

• Borenstein, J. and , J. (2003). “Semantic Discovery for Web Services.” Web Services Journal. SYS-CON Publications, Inc. Vol. 3, issue 4. www.sys-con.com/webservices/articleprint.cfm?id=507
• Cowles, P. (2005). “Web Service API and the Semantic Web.” Web Services Journal. SYS-CON Publications, Inc. Vol. 5, issue 2. www.sys-con.com/story/?storyid=39631&DE=1
• Genovese, Y., Hayword, S., and Comport, J. (2004). “SOA Will Demand Re-engineering of Business Applications.” Gartner. October 8.
• Linthicum, D. (2005). “When Building Your SOA…Service Descriptions Are Key.” WebServices.Org. March 2005. www.webservices.org/ws/content/view/full/56944
• Schulte, R.W., Valdes, R., and Andrews, W. (2004). “SOA and Web Services Offer Little Vendor Independence.” Gartner. April 8.
• W3C Web Services Architecture Working Group: www.w3.org/2002/ws/arch/

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“An artist, a guru, a coach, and a spy” is how David C. Baker and Michael Janiszewski describe enterprise architects in their article 7 Essential Elements of EA.
The full quote is, “An enterprise architect requires a unique blend of skills. At various times he or she needs to employ the characteristics of an artist, a guru, a coach, and a spy.” Besides being pithy because it sounds like the intro to one of those ‘____ walk into a bar’ jokes, this rings true for enterprise information architects. However, humorousness aside, this isn’t terribly useful. And overall, the article is a fine breakdown of what’s required to put enterprise architecture into practice, but it only offers the pioneer’s perspective on where enterprise-level architects come from.
Their take, “Enterprise architects grow from within the technical architecture ranks, learning how to be artists, gurus, coaches, and spies as they work their way from being technical specialists, through application or infrastructure architects, eventually to enterprise architects.”
This is an honest if after-the-fact apprasial of a self-directed career growth trajectory that is no stranger to veteran IAs. It’s not adequate as a way to expand the understood scope of information architecture roles to address the enterprise perspective. I feel comfortable saying Information Architecture is accepted as relevant and useful in many areas of business activity, from user research and experience design to product development and strategy, after a few lean years following the dot com crash. But I’m not comfortable saying we have appropriate representation or even access to the enterprise level. It’s here that the business and information perspectives come together in an architectural sense, and also here where we should strive to make sure we’re valued and sought out.
We need to discover, create and define the paths that lead Information Architects to enterprise level positions.to action>
The alternative is being left behind.

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