archive.Joe Lamantia.com

IBM recently announced the next version of Lotus Notes will support OpenDocument Format as a native file format (as reported in IBM Bets Big On Open Source In Next Release Of Lotus Notes). This shift to an open file format is – as the majority of the coverage of IBM’s announcement correctly interprets it to be – a direct challenge to the dominance of the Office suite of productivity applications, a class of products in which Microsoft has long relied on proprietary file formats as a cornerstone of it’s market control strategy. Making the challenge explicit, the next version of Lotus Notes will also include “…built-in word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation graphics software”.

Since Microsoft relies on the integration of SharePoint and the Office suite as a pillar of it’s collaboration plans (in Gates outlines SharePoint strategy, hammers IBM, John Fontana of Network World quotes Bill Gates as saying, “The key point is that SharePoint is becoming the key platform for collaboration of all types… When people look back on what we are doing with Office [2007] here, the most revolutionary element will be what we are doing with SharePoint.”), IBM’s shift to OpenDocument Format is also a strategic move in the larger category of enterprise collaboration, itself a subset of the emerging comprehensive information working environments Forrester Research calls the information workplace.

An End to Imperialism
I’ve suggested already that the conceptual construct labeled ‘collaboration’ is at heart another instance of enterprise software and solution vendor marketing rhetoric designed to mask reality – it’s simply not possible to change established cultural, organizational, perceptual, or philosophical understandings of what work is and how it should be done with an approach centered on technology – in a quasi-utopian haze.

IBM’s adoption of OpenDocument doesn’t change this picture of the collaboration landscape. Instead, it indicates a larger shift; dawning recognition and acknowledgment that monocultures are no longer viable, or valid, or broadly acceptable in the enterprise arena.

The creation and preservation of monocultures (recently in the news associated with Microsoft thanks to Dan Greer and others’ prescience) is one of the salient characteristics of the old approach to enterprise software solutions. It is especially visible in those enterprise solutions whose intended role within a portfolio of product and service offerings is to serve as a consistent revenue source, strategic bulwark against competition, and cost shifting mechanism whereby clients paid for the development of new products and services, often under the guise of maintenance, patches, upgrades, etc.

Broadly, the old approach to enterprise solutions was an imperial model, with aspects of colonialism, that pursued a military style take and hold growth pattern.

Wikipedia offers the following introduction to imperialism:
“Imperialism is a policy of extending control or authority over foreign entities as a means of acquisition and/or maintenance of empires. This is either through direct territorial conquest or settlement, or through indirect methods of exerting control on the politics and/or economy of other countries. The term is often used to describe the policy of a country’s dominance over distant lands, regardless of whether the country considers itself part of the empire.”

In the realm of software imperialism, the customer organization buying and installing an enterprise software package was seen as a form of territory to be occupied or controlled by one or more hostile, rivalrous software and services vendors seeking to extract continuing revenues from their occupied possessions; revenues in the form of maintenance, support, customization, administration, or other sorts of solution upkeep and extension expenses.

Empires exerted control formally through a variety of political and economic mechanisms, and informally through influence over political, economic and cultural spheres. Wikipedia’s entry for “empire” offers some instructive parallels to the enterprise solution model:

“First, in an empire there must be a Core and a Periphery. The empire’s structure relates the core elite to the peripheral elite in a mutually beneficial fashion. Such as relationship can be established through any number of means, be they aggressive, coercise, or consensual. And while there is a vertical relationship between the core and periphery, there is a lack of substantive relations between periphery and periphery. This relationship he describes as an incomplete wheel: there are hubs and spokes, but no rim.”
The relationship of interconnected elites is easy to see in the pattern of incented sales and buying decisions; “Need tickets to that exclusive event? No problem, we’ll get them for you right away…”

But it’s the idea of disconnected hubs and spokes that is key to understanding the correspondence between the old enterprise model and imperialism. How often do individual client solutions (perhaps for different departments or business units) interact with each other? How often do instances of the same solution for different clients allow effective interaction between different clients of the same vendor? How often do different products nominally part of ‘integrated’ solution sets that were in actuality assembled by aggregating the offerings of acquired companies successfully interact?
Again, without overloading the analogy, there are clear parallels between the degrees of empire and the lifecycle of enterprise solutions and vendors.

“Motyl also posits varying degrees of empire: Formal, Informal, and Hegemonic. In a formal imperial relationship, the core can appoint and dismiss peripheral elites, obviate any external agenda or policies, and directly control the internal agenda and policies.”

As a consultant, I’ve seen aggressive software and services vendors directly drive business direction, strategy, investment, and process change decisions all too often. Organizations lacking vision, effective leadership, or those entering complacency or suffering decline look to vendors for leadership by proxy, allowing or asking vendors to apply their own inappropriate frames of reference and perspectives to understand and choose courses of action in situations outside the vendor’s proper domain.

“In an informal imperial relationship, the core has influence but not control over appointing and dismissing peripheral elites, direct control over the external agenda and policies, and influence over the internal agenda and policies.”

This informal relationship is the position of the entrenched vendor that provides ‘perspective’ on many situations outside their proper domain. Vendors seeking to increase their territory within client organizations often pursue growth via this method. Alternatively, vendors will control the environment in which customers and other service providers make decisions, as in the “open API” approach wherein the enterprise exposes a portion of it’s architecture, code base, or other platform, but maintains exclusive control over the API without any binding commitments.

Wikipedia continues:

“Finally, in a hegemonic relationship, the core has no control over appointing or dismissing peripheral elites, control over the external agenda, influence over external policies, and no control over the internal agenda or policies.”
This is the stage that the existing collaboration solutions seem to be entering, as witnessed by IBM’s announcement, and Microsoft’s failure to date to advance the OpenXML standard to full legitimacy.

The Passing of Imperium
In essence, the old enterprise approach exemplified the closed system, one that was sustained by the authority and credibility of the originating vendor in the face of other competing closed systems. Fundamentally, software empires and imperialism are predicated on the validity of closed systems. What happens when open systems become the preferred model?

“Empire ends when significant peripheral interaction begins, not necessarily when the core ceases its domination of the peripheries. The core-periphery relationship can be as strong or weak as possible and remain an empire as long as there is only insignificant interaction between periphery and periphery.”

OpenDocument is designed to allow exactly the sort of periphery to periphery interaction that closed architectures prohibited. IBM’s shift to OpenDocument shows awareness that old style closed imperial enterprise systems are no longer viable. In this, they are following the changing rhetoric of those such as Larry Cannell from collaborationloop.com, who offers a strongly pro-open system view in A Vision For Collaborative Technologies:

“I believe openness breeds innovation, and there are many parts of the collaborative technology market that need a big injection of innovation. While vendors continue pushing integration as their primary value proposition for closed systems, the astute competitor will embrace openness and provide innovation within an ecosystem of collaborative technologies based on open standards. Today we have a plethora of email systems which nearly everyone connected to the Internet is capable of using. We need comparable open and simple choices for other collaborative technologies; whether it is collaborative workspaces or online communities. It will not be until we have simple open standards that foster familiarity and easy interconnectivity that will we see widespread use and explosive innovation.”

Cannell is careful here to take a positive and forward-looking line regarding collaboration, but his view of closed systems is clearly negative. And the implied consequence of a closed system is lack of innovation, one of the key signs of organizations in decline.
Didn’t I start out by saying that we should be wary of the marketing rhetoric surrounding collaboration? Yes, precisely because the majority of the rhetoric coming from enterprise vendors still exemplifies the closed system, imperialist enterprise ethos.

However, in the case of IBM, it’s clear that they’ve anticipated the consequences of ignoring the environmental shift to open systems that is at hand, and reacted accordingly, at least as regards the core document standard underlying Lotus Notes (which is still awful, BTW, just in case anyone misinterprets this article to mean I think otherwise…). The relationship of Notes to Workplace seems largely unknown at this point, and still subject to bitter infighting, in another great parallel to the imperial model. Microsoft, as the other major collaboration vendor, may be able to stem the tide against open systems in the short term, but will eventually have to respond.

My thoughts on the current form of enterprise solutions as a class / industry / way of solving business problems remain unaltered – in fact I think that IBM’s move supports many of the predictions I made earlier this year, following earlier treatments by others writing on the same subjects.

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…

Proving that a well-developed sense of humor is required for success in product design — especially for Lotus Notes — Mary Beth Raven, who leads the design team for the next version of Lotus Notes, recently posted a rather funny comment in reply to my suggestion that the Notes Design team offer customers a choice of unpleasant but related user experience themes. She used this as the occasion to invite all members of the community of Notes to users to register as volunteers for usability testing.
I’ve made three postings to date specifically discussing the Notes user experience: Lotus Notes User Experience = Disease, Mental Models, Resilience, and Lotus Notes, and Better UI Tops Notes Users’ Wish Lists. I’m not sure which of these prompted Mary Beth to reach out, but I’m glad she did, because doing so is smart business on two levels. At the first level, Mary Beth plainly understands that while vocal critics may seem daunting to user experience designers, product managers, and business owners, engaging these critics in fact presents design teams with opportunities to build strong connections to users and gather valuable feedback at the same time. What better way is there to show the strategic value of user research?
I learned this at first hand while working on a redesign of the flagship web presence of a large software firm several years ago. Some of the most insightful and useful feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of the user experiences I was responsible for came from ‘disgruntled’ customers. The user research I was doing on site structures, navigation paths, and user goals established a channel that allowed unhappy (and happy) customers to communicate about a broad range of their experiences with PTC products and services in a more complete way than by simply buying a competing product, or renewing an existing software license.
Based on these and other experiences building user research programs, I suggest that product managers, user research leads, and user experience designers first collaborate to define a user research strategy, and then define and create a simple but effective user research infrastructure (like registration gateways to volunteer databases, community / program identifiers and incentives, contact management tools, specific personas that technical and customer support teams can learn to recognize and recruit at all stages of the customer lifecycle, etc.) that will support the creation of channels to users throughout the design cycle.
At the second level, it allows the Notes team to directly explore collaboration methods, products, and technologies related to the very competitive collaboration suite / integrated electronic workspace / office productivity markets in which IBM, Microsoft, and several other giant firms are looking to secure dominant positions in the new culture of collaboration. [Note: I’ve posted a few times on Microsoft products as well – Backwards Goals: MS Office Results Oriented UI, and Microsoft’s Philosophy On Information Architecture.]
Members of the community of Lotus Notes users can register as volunteers for usability tests during the design of the next version of Notes at this URL: https://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/usentry.nsf/register?openform.

Related posts:

But not the new features list for the next release. In a previous post Lotus Notes UI = Disease, I cited a SearchDomino.com article in which Ken Bisconti, IBM Lotus vice president of Workplace, portal and collaboration products, is quoted as saying “Through improvements such as contextual collaboration and support for composite apps, we’ve gone *above and beyond simple UI enhancement*”. [Emphasis mine.] Above and beyond? I think UI enhancement – which is often far from simple, especially when the existing user experience is fundamentally flawed – is exactly what Notes needs.
After watching software development first hand, I know that many Product Managers understand the importance of quality, design, and meeting users’ needs, but do not feel empowered to work against the pervasive featuritis that leads to unusable bloatware. Good product managers and designers often work for organizations or managers who remain blinded by standard practices and marketing driven perceptions of priority, and thus feel it’s impossible to step off the new functionality treadmill.
That is, unless they are armed with information that indicates to the contrary.
The article in Ken’s statement appears, Beyond Notes 7.0: IBM Lotus sketches ‘Hannover’ user experience, is dated June 14, 2005. Yet when digging it bit more, I discovered an earlier piece from May 9, 2005, titled Better UI tops Notes users’ wish list, in which the same author, Peter Blochner, reports on the results of an open request for Lotus Notes features made by Ed Brill(Brill heads the worldwide sales group for Notes, according to Blochner). In his review of user responses to Brill’s question, Blochner says, “the most requested feature was for an improved user interface for Notes.”
Simple UI enhancement is all that the users want, and they’ve said it themselves. Yet Notes is going way beyond this? Despite repeated and public requests for this from committed users (Ed Brill’s blog is a predominantly Notes-friendly forum) in their own voices, and in response to questions from your own team. Why not listen to them?
For reference, Blochner’s article is reproduced below:
By Peter Bochner
09 May 2005 | SearchDomino.com
IBM is already working on plans for the next major releases of Lotus Notes beyond 7.0. Last week, on May 3, visitors to the blog site of Ed Brill, who heads up worldwide sales for Lotus Notes and Domino, were asked, “If you could add one feature to Lotus Notes 7.x, what would it be?”
As of May 9, his question has garnered 184 comments, although many respondents circumvented the question’s one-feature limit by submitting multiple posts.
To kick off the thread, Brill provided his own request – multi-level undo – and that was reiterated by seven posters. However, the most requested feature was for an improved user interface for Notes. “It’s time to give the Notes client UI a much-needed facelift,” wrote one respondent. When people say Exchange is better than Notes, said another, “What they are saying is that the Outlook interface is . . .nicer than the [Notes] mail template. A top UI for the next release would top off a lot of end-user complaints.”
Only a handful of responses mentioned specific suggestions for improving the UI. One asked for “a first-class, richly configurable Welcome Panel that resembles a Web portal.” Another suggested UI improvements such as “more user-selectable columns in folders/views, having preferences all in one place, or rules that can act on documents already in the mail file.” Still another requested “a sexy modern mail template with a single UI in Notes and on the Web.”
Finally, one user said, “What would it be worth if every part of the Notes mail experience, which …is the Notes interface for the majority of users, from the toolbars to the icons to interaction and behavior, was consistent, modern, clean and inviting? There is no point in having the superior everything if it’s not appealing to look at.”
P.S. Brill has requested a moratorium on suggestions, because the thread is now so long it has become unwieldy.

Related posts:

Lotus Notes has one of the most unpleas­ant and unwel­com­ing User Expe­ri­ences this side of a medium-security prison where the war­den has aspi­ra­tions towards inte­rior design and art instruc­tion. One of the most painful aspects of the Notes expe­ri­ence is the default set­tings for font size and color in the email win­dow. The default font size (for Macs) is on the order of 7 point type, and the default color for unread mes­sages is — iron­i­cally — red. The com­bi­na­tion yields a user expe­ri­ence that resem­bles a bad skin rash.

I call it “angry red microNotes” dis­ease, and it looks like this:

Over­all, it has an unhealthy affect on one’s state of mind. The under­tones of hos­til­ity and resent­ment run­ning through­out are man­i­fold. And nat­u­rally, it is impos­si­ble to change the default font size and color for the email reader. This is fur­ther con­fir­ma­tion for my the­ory that Notes has yet to escape it’s roots as a thick client for series of uncon­nected data­bases.

After three weeks of suf­fer­ing from angry red microNotes, I real­ized I was lit­er­ally going blind from squint­ing at the tiny type, and went to Google for relief. I found niniX 1.7, a util­ity that allows Mac based Lotus Notes users the abil­ity to edit the binary for­mat Notes pref­er­ences file, and change the font size of the email client. I share it in the hopes that oth­ers may break the chains that blind them. This will only solve half the prob­lem — if some­one can fig­ure out how to change the default color for unread mes­sages to some­thing besides skin rash red, I will hap­pily share with the rest of the suf­fer­ing masses (and appar­ently there are on the order of 118 mil­lion of us out there).

But will it always be this (hor­ri­ble) way?

In Beyond Notes 7.0: IBM Lotus sketches ‘Han­nover’ user expe­ri­ence Peter Bochner of SearchDomino.com says this of the next Notes release, “Notes has often been crit­i­cized for its some­what staid user inter­face. Accord­ing to IBM’s Bis­conti, in cre­at­ing Han­nover, IBM paid atten­tion “to not just the user inter­face, but the user expe­ri­ence.“

Okay… So does that mean I’ll have my choice of dis­eases as themes for the user expe­ri­ence of my col­lab­o­ra­tion envi­ron­ment?
Accord­ing to Ken Bis­conti, IBM Lotus vice pres­i­dent of Work­place, por­tal and col­lab­o­ra­tion prod­ucts, “Through improve­ments such as con­tex­tual col­lab­o­ra­tion and sup­port for com­pos­ite apps, we’ve gone above and beyond sim­ple UI enhance­ment”.

I think sim­ple UI enhance­ment is exactly what Ken and his team should focus on for the next sev­eral years, since they have so much oppor­tu­nity for improvement.

Several very unpleasant experiences I’ve had with the Lotus Notes webmail client during the past few weeks have brought up some questions about mental models; specifically how users respond to challenges to their mental models, and how resilience plays a part in how changes to mental models occur.
The IAWiki defines a mental model as, “a mental model is how the user thinks the product works.” This is a simplified definition, but it’s adequate for the moment. For a deeper exploration, try Martina Angela Sasse’s thesis
Eliciting and Describing Users’ Models of Computer Systems.
In this case, the model and the challenge are straightforward. My mental model of the Notes webmail client includes the understanding that it can send email messages. The challenge: the Lotus webmail client cannot send email messages – at least not as I experience it.
Here’s what happens my mental model and my reality don’t match:

1. I log in to my email client via Firefox – the only browser on the Mac that renders the Notes webmail client vaguely correctly – (I’m using webmail because the full Notes client requires VPN, meaning I’m unable to access anything on my local network, or the internet, which, incidentally, makes it difficult to seem like a credible internet consultant.) again, because it’s frozen and crashed my browser in the past ten minutes.
2. I realize I need to respond to an email
3. I do not remember that the Notes webmail client is incapable of sending out email messages
4. I open a new message window, and compose a chunk of semi-grammatical techno-corporate non-speak to communicate a few simple points in blame-retardant consultantese
5. I attempt to send this email
6. I am confronted with a cryptic error message via javascript prompt, saying something like “We’re really sorry, but Domino sucks, so you can’t send out any messages using your email client.”
7. Over the span of .376 seconds, I move through successive states of surprise, confusion, comprehension, frustration, anger, resentment, resignation, and malaise (actually, mailaise is more accurate.)
8. I swear: silently if clients are within earshot, out loud if not
9. I switch to gmail, create a new message, copy the text of my message from the Notes webmail window to Gmail, and send the message to some eagerly waiting recipient
10. I close the Notes webmail client, and return to business as usual.
11. I forget that the Notes webmail client cannot send email messages.

Despite following this same path three times per day, five days each week, for the past five weeks, (for a total of ~75 clear examples), I am always surprised when I can’t send a message. I’m no expert on Learning theory but neither lack of attention nor stubbornness explain why seventy-five examples aren’t enough to change my model of how Notes works.
Disciplines including systems theory, biology, and sociology use a concept called resilience. In any stable system, “Resilience generally means the ability to recover from some shock, insult, or disturbance.” From an ecological perspective, resilience “is a measure of the amount of change or disruption that is required to transform a system.” The psychological view emphasizes “the ability of people to cope with stress and catastrophe.”
Apparently, the resilience of my model for email clients is high enough to withstand considerable stress, since – in addition to the initial catastrophe of using Notes itself – seventy-five consecutive examples of failure to work as expected do not equal enough shock, insult, and disturbance to my model to lead to a change my in understanding.
Notice that I’m using a work-around – switching to Gmail – to achieve my goal and send email. In
Resilience Management in Social-ecological Systems: a Working Hypothesis for a Participatory Approach , Brian Walker and several others refine the meaning of resilience to include, “The degree to which the system expresses capacity for learning and adaptation.” This accounts nicely for the Gmail work-around.
I also noticed that I’m relying on a series of assumptions – email clients can send messages; Notes is an email client; therefore, Notes can send messages – that make it logical to use a well established model for email clients in general to anticipate the workings of Notes webmail in particular. In new contexts, it’s easier to borrow an existing model than develop a new one. In short order, I expect I’ll change one of the assumptions, or build a model for Notes webmail.
Here’s a few questions that come to mind:

1. What factors determine the resilience of a mental model?
2. How to measure resiliency in mental models?
3. What’s the threshold of recovery for a mental model?
4. Put another way, what’s required to change a mental model?

Based on a quick review of the concept of resilience from several perspectives, I’m comfortable saying it’s a valuable way of looking at mental models, with practical implications for information architects.
Some of those implications are:

1. Understand the relevance of existing mental models when designing new systems
2. Anticipate and plan the ways that users will form a mental model of the system
3. Use design at multiple levels to further the formation of mental models
4. Understand thresholds and resilience factors when challenging existing mental models

From a broader view, I think it’s safe to say the application of systems theory to information architecture constitutes an important area for exploration, one containing challenges and opportunities for user experience practitioners in general, and information architects in particular.
Time to close this post before it gets too long.
Further reading:
Bio of Ludwig Bertalanffy, important contributor to General System Theory.
Doug Cocks Resilience Alliance
Garry Peterson’s blog Resilience Science

Related posts:

Below is an excerpt from an email sent to all employees – a ‘global broadcast’, very Max Headroom… – of a larger company (name removed), in response to repeated plees to improve the nightmarish user experience of the time and expense system that all employees must use.
<begin transmission>
There have been a few issues with the submitting and/or processing of Expense Reports resulting from individuals using data fields which have no value to [company], but may have processing impacts within the system. At this time, there is no way to remove or ‘grey-out’ these unused fields. If you have not been trained on the use of a field and/or do not know what the field may/may not do, don’t enter any data within that field – ask your branch admin or contact the help desk.
</end transmission>
What a fantastic example of a user experience directly impacting business: useless but open entry fields = garbage data = inaccurate financials!
Let’s peak into the inner chambers, to see how this might play out:
CEO> “How are we doing this week for revenue?”
CFO> “No idea. I don’t have any numbers to work with.”
CEO> “Why not? That’s ten weeks in a row!”
COO> “Another financials system crash.”
CTO> “Some junior tech in nowheresville accidentally hit the drop select of death again, and now we can’t get reports done for that half of the country.”
CEO> “The analysts and the board are going to kill me – someone take care of this right now.”
COO> “Fix it, or get rid of it!”
CTO> “We can’t fix it – we didn’t buy the configuration module. And we cut the deployment services contract from 24 weeks to 6 weeks, so there was no time to figure out which fields we needed from the generic installation…”

Related posts: