Todd Biske: Outside the Box

Archive for the ‘Usability’ Category

Courtesy of Rich Seeley and SearchWebServices.com, I caught up with the recent announcement from IBM Rational at their IBM Rational Software Development Conference going on in Orlando.

Rich paraphrased David Locke, director for IBM Rational Worldwide Marketing Strategy, stating that “the next generation tools that the Jazz project is expected to create will aim at providing real-time collaboration of geographically dispersed project teams through things like embedding instant messaging technology into development tools.” There are a few things that occurred to me after reading this.

First, the idea of “open commercial” is quite interesting. IBM Rational still intends to develop “fully commercial” products, yet they’re doing it through a very open process. As long as the community doesn’t revolt on them for wanting their time without somehow sharing the profits, this could be successful. While I’ve never seen studies on it, I still suspect that the bulk of open source products are still strongly subsidized by paid staff of companies that are making money from it (e.g. IBM, MySQL). I’m sure IBM and BEA both have paid staffers who spend all of their time on Apache projects.

Second, the mention of instant messaging brought up recent memories for me. While I don’t think anyone has noticed, there’s a link at the top of this blog labeled “Talk to Me”. As an experiment, I put a Google Talk widget on the site. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work the way I’d like it to. Effectively, I wanted it to be pre-configured with a buddy list of me, without the ability to chat to anyone else, or maybe just to people visiting my blog. There wasn’t a way to do it. I looked into other systems, but didn’t find a way to integrate with my existing IM clients. To make Google Talk work, I had to post instructions on adding me to the buddy list, which isn’t that great of a solution. Anyway, my point with all of this is that it’s a big challenge on figuring out how to integrate all of these things. I was listening to the latest Monkcast from ZDNet and Redmonk and listening to the guys reminisce that at one time years ago, Microsoft Exchange was winning because of its simplicity. I will certainly agree that keeping things simple can be beneficial, but eventually there becomes a need to integrate all of these smaller, simple items into something that is more functional and efficient. Balancing those tradeoffs is not an easy problem. Here again, I think there is power in the masses and opening it up to the community. The last thing we need is an embedded and isolated IM client, and that’s just one example. Personally, I hope that the community looks into some of the lightweight capabilities provided by things like the MacOS X Dashboard and Vista Sidebar and see if we can get the simplicity of these low-functionality interfaces but yet allow “right-time” integration with the tools we’re using the majority of the time.

Joe McKendrick posted a followup with some of the discussions that have went on within the comments of his blog regarding his commentary on the recent ZapFlash about barriers to SOA adoption. While most of the comments amount to vendor bashing, the one that stuck out to me was the one that said, “SOA offers nothing different than what the vast majority of good IT teams have been doing for more than a decade. Think strategically? We do. We recognize SOA for what it is: nothing.”

My first comment is that SOA is indeed, evolutionary, not revolutionary. That being said, I simply don’t believe that most IT departments can truly believe that they’re doing a great job. Are there some that are? Absolutely. Are those great ones thinking strategically? Probably so. But what about the rest of the pack? To them, I ask one simple question: What has changed? If you’re viewing this strictly as a technology thing where you throw some REST or Web Services into the same-old solutions that you’ve been building, you’re not getting it. If the business is unhappy with IT, something needs to change. Perhaps its a change in how things get built and how we view lifecycles (such as product lifecycles instead of development lifecycles). Maybe that manifests itself in organizational changes. Perhaps it is more operationally focused with visibility and reporting on subsystems that are of significance to the business rather than another IT worker. These are just some examples. If you’re still defining projects in the same old way, deploying them in the same old way, etc., well then, not much has changed, has it. I hope that 10 years from now some things have changed, but IT moves very slowly. 10 years ago, I was hoping usability and user-centered design philosophies would continue to gain prominence, and those are still in their emerging stages in many corporate enterprises. At least I know I’ll have a long career in advocacy!

I’m currently reading The Technology Garden: Cultivating Sustainable IT-Business Alignment by the Neils from Macehiter Ward-Dutton along with Jon Collins and Dale Vile of Freeform Dynamics. In the spirit of full disclosure, the publicist sent me a free advance copy of the book, as Amazon reports its availability as June 11th. I’m about halfway through it, and it’s been a pleasant read. Chapters four and five have particularly caught my attention. They are titled, “Create a common language” and “Establish a peer relationship between business and IT.” The common language chapter puts the onus on IT to learn the language of the business. While they also state that no competent business executive should be technology-ignorant (my words, not theirs), the bulk of the burden is on the technology staff. In the next chapter, it begins with a discussion on how many IT groups play a supplier role, and how that simply isn’t good enough these days. While service delivery and management is very important for building trust, it’s not sufficient. They state:

Suppliers, by definition, do what they’re told. The customer is always right! The parameters of service delivery are defined by the ‘customer,’ and thereafter the supplier delivers, in response to requests, in the context of those parameters (you can think of these as ‘contracts’ and ‘service-level agreements’).

When I read this, it occurred to me that as an industry, we really haven’t made much progress on the whole concept of IT and business as peers. I’ve mentioned previously that in my early days, I did a lot of work on user interface technologies, and had a strong interest in human-computer interaction during college. My first introduction to user-centered design techniques and viewing the end user as a partner in the process was in the summer of 1993. That was 14 years ago, and yet I’d have to say that in general, IT still operates in a supplier role, with things thrown back and forth over the business/IT wall. I really liked the emphasis on communication in Chapter 4 of the book. If the continued prevalence of IT as a supplier mentality is due to a fundamental lack of trust, the only thing that will eventually break it down is communication. I’ve certainly been guilty of falling into the typical technologist mode of communicating: email. As they call out, it’s time to starting getting out of our chairs, out of our comfort zones, and start communicating. If you don’t know who to begin your conversations with, seek someone out that can help you with that.

I had the experience of participating in an exercise directed by a CIO where we were split into groups of 8 people, and then furthered subdivided into two groups of 4 seated at separate tables. Each table had a task to accomplish as outlined on a piece of paper. All tasks were identical, and each set of 8 people had identical equipment at their table to complete the task. The goal of the task was to ensure that each sub-group of 4 built identical solutions. If you’ve seen Apollo 13, this whole thing was prefaced by a video clip from the movie where the engineers at Mission Control dump a box full of stuff on the table and have to figure out a way to build a carbon dioxide scrubber out of it. They then have to get the Apollo 13 astronauts to do the same. The interesting thing about this task was that the instructions were not very limiting. For example, there was nothing that said one group of four couldn’t get up and go sit with the other four and complete the whole thing together. The point of the exercise was that we set many artificial boundaries in our work based on past experiences, culture, etc. In fact, there are probably more artificial boundaries than real boundaries. Does your company have a stated policy that you can’t go and talk to an end user on the business side? If they don’t, there’s nothing preventing you from doing that. If we’re going to begin building trust back up in the IT/Business relationship, it is time to step outside of the box and start communicating as peers. Let’s not wait another 14 years to start making a change.

I’ve been meaning to post on this subject for some time, so it’s good that I got to the airport a little earlier than normal today. There’s nothing like blogging at 5:30 in the morning.

As I mentioned in my last entry, I just finished listening to a podcast from IT Conversations on the drive to the airport which was a discussion on user experience with Irene Au, Director of User Experience for Google. One of the questions she took from the audience dealt with the notion of having a centralized group for User Experience, or whether it should be a decentralized activity. This question is one that frequently comes up in SOA discussions, as well. Should you have a centralized service development, or should your efforts be decentralized? There’s no right or wrong answer to this question, however, it’s certainly true that your choices can impact your success. In the podcast, Irene discussed the matrixed approach at Yahoo, and how everything would up being funded by business units. This made it difficult to do activities for the greater good, such as style guides, etc. The business unit wanted to maximize their investment and have those resources focused on their activities, not someone else’s. Putting this same topic in the context of SOA, this would be the same as having user-facing application teams developing services. The challenge is that the business unit wants that user-facing application, and they want it yesterday. How do we create services that aren’t solely of value to just that application. At the opposite extreme, things can be centralized. Irene discussed the culture of open office hours at Google, and how she’ll have a line of people outside her office with their user experience questions in hand. While this may allow her to maintain a greater level of consistency, resource management can be a big challenge, as you are being pulled in multiple directions. Again, putting this in the SOA context, the risk is that in the quest for the perfect enterprise service, you can put individual project schedules at risk as they wait for the service they are dependent on. These are both extreme positions, and seldom is an organization at one extreme or the other, but usually somewhere in the middle.

In trying to tackle this problem, it’s useful to think of things as either horizontal or vertical. Horizontal concepts are ones where breadth is the more important concern. For example, infrastructure is most frequently presented as a horizontal concern. I can take a four CPU server and run just about anything I’d like on it these days, meaning it provides broad coverage across a variety of functional domains. A term frequently used these days is commodity hardware, and the notion of commoditization is a characteristic of horizontal domains. When breadth becomes more important that depth, there’s usually not many opportunities for innovation. Largely, activities become more focused on reducing the cost by leveraging economies of scale. Commoditization and standardization go hand in hand, as it’s difficult to classify something as a commodity that doesn’t meet some standard criteria. In the business world, these horizontal areas are also ones that are frequently outsourced, as all companies typically do it the same way meaning there is little room for competitive differentiation.

Vertical concepts are ones where depth is the more important concern. In contrast to the commoditization associated with horizontal concerns, vertical items are ones where innovation can occur and where companies can set themselves apart from their competitors. User experience is still an area where significant differentiation can occur, so most user-facing applications fall into this category. Business knowledge, customer experience (preferably at a partnership level to have them involved in the process), are keys at this level.

By nature, vertical and horizontal concerns are orthogonal and can create tension. I have a friend who works as a user experience consultant and he once asked me about how to balance the concerns that may come from a user experience focus, clearly rooted in the vertical domains with the concerns of SOA, which are arguably focused on more horizontal concerns. There’s no easy answer to this. Just as the business must make decisions over time on where to commoditize and where to specialize, the same holds true for IT. Apple is a great example to look at, as their decision to not commoditize in their early days clearly resulted in them being relegated to niche (but still relevant) status in computer sales. Those same principles, however, to remain more vertically-focused with tight top-to-bottom controls have now resulted in their successes with their computers, iTunes, Apple TV, the iPod, and the forthcoming iPhone. There are a number of ways to be successful, although far fewer ways than there are to be unsuccessful.

When trying to slice up your functional domains into domains of services, you must certainly align it with the business goals. If there is an area of the business where they are trying to create competitive differentiation, this is probably not the best area to look for services that will have broad enterprise reuse, although it is very dependent on whether technology plays a direct role in that differentiation or an indirect role, such as whether the business to consumer interaction is solely through a website, or if it is through a company representative (e.g. a financial advisor). These areas that are closest to the end user are likely to require some degree of verticality to allow for tighter controls and differentiation. That’s not to say they own the entire solution, top to bottom, however, which would be a monolith.

As we go deeper into the stack, you should look for areas where commoditization and standardization outweighs the benefits of customization. It may begin at a domain level, such as integration across a suite of applications for a single business unit, with each successive level increasing the breadth of coverage. There is no point where the vertical solutions stop, and everything beneath it has enterprise breadth. Rather, it is a continuum of decreasing emphasis on depth and increasing emphasis on breadth. A Internet company may try to differentiate themselves in their end-user facing systems that the users interact with, allowing a large degree of autonomy for each product line. The supporting services behind those user interfaces will increase in the breadth of their scope, but still may require some degree of specialization, such as having to deal with a particular region of a country or even the world for global organizations. We then bleed into the area of “applistructure” and solutions that fall more into the support arena. A CRM system will have close ties to the end-user facing sales portal. The breadth of CRM coverage may need to span multiple lines of business, unlike the sales portal, where specialization could occur. Going deeper, we have applications that may have no ties to the end-user facing systems, but are still necessary to run a business, such as Human Resources. Interestingly, if you’re following my logic you may be thinking that these things should all be outsourced, but the truth is that many of these areas are still far from being commoditized. That’s because they involve user facing components, which brings us back to those vertical domains where customization can add value. An organization that outsources the technology side of HR, but doesn’t have an associated reduction in HR staff may have a potential conflict when they want to have specialized HR processes, but are dealing with commodity interfaces and systems. Put simply, you can’t have it both ways.

The trend continues on down the stack to the infrastructure and the world of the individual developer. If you’re truly wanting to adopt SOA from top to bottom, there should be a high degree of commoditization and standardization at this level. Organizations where solutions are still built top-to-bottom, with customized hardware platforms, source code management, programming languages, etc. are going to struggle with SOA, because their culture is vertically-oriented to an extreme.

While the speed of change, business decisions on what things are core competencies and what things are not do not change overnight. Taking an organization where each product group had its own staff (vertically-oriented) and switching it to a centralized sales organization (horizontally-oriented) is a significant cultural change, and often doesn’t go smoothly. You only need to look at the number of mergers and acquisitions that have been deemed successful (less than 50%) to understand the difficulty. Switching from vertically-focused IT solutions to horizontally-focused IT solutions is just as difficult, if not more difficult. Humans are significantly more adaptable than technology solutions, which at the core, are binary, yes/no environments. The important thing is to recognize when misalignment is occurring and take action to fix it. That’s all about governance. If users are trying to apply significant customization to a technology area that has been deemed as a commodity by the business, push back needs to occur to emphasis that the greater good takes precedence over individual needs. If IT is taking far too long to deliver a solution in an area where time to market and competitive differentiation is critical, remove the barriers and give that group more control over the solution, at the expense of broader applicability. If you don’t know what your priorities and principles are, however, for each domain, you’ll end up in and endless sequence of meetings that are rooted in opinions, rather than documented principles and behaviors desired by the organization.

I just listened to another great podcast from IT Conversations. This one is from the Adaptive Path series, and is a chat with Irene Au, the Director of User Experience at Google. Irene’s also a fellow alumnus of the University of Illinois (go Illini). User experience has always been a passion of mine, and it was interesting to hear what Irene’s done in her career at both Yahoo and now Google. The discussion was not so much about User Experience per se, but the way her and her teams have been utilized. If you’re interested in a little bit of insight into Google (the “testing on the toilet” part was great), I encourage you to give it a listen.

It’s always refreshing to see someone else thinking along the same lines as yourself. The latest case for me was Om Malik in the April 2007 issue of Business 2.0. His column for that issue is titled, “Putting Widgets to Work.” He feels that there is significant promise for corporate widgets. This sounds very familiar to my post last week on Widgets, Gadgets, etc. You can read the teaser on his blog here, or read the full article over at CNNMoney.com.

In the recently released SOA Insights Podcast, Dana and guests discussed the wacky world of mashups and composite applications. The panelists all agreed that mashups and composite applications are effectively the same thing, however, they did state that mashups tend to be associated with web-based presentation more so than composite applications. The debate moved into a discussion of SaaS providers (e.g. Salesforce.com) and aggregators like StrikeIron. Google apps was also thrown into the mix, however, I don’t consider that a mashup or a composite application. Google Calendar or Google Spreadsheet are really just hosted versions of traditional desktop applications. Given that the conversation went this direction, it surprised me that the discussion did not go down into the area of Widgets and Gadgets, depending on which operating system you like.

Before we go there, let’s first look features of mashups. The most familiar notion of a mashup is a geographic overlay of some information on a Google map. This is possible through the availability of data as XML from simple HTTP calls, the scriptability of a web-based presentation component, such as Google maps, and the use of AJAX technologies to tie the two together. How does this relate to SOA? The most direct connection is in the first item: data services making data available as XML over HTTP. Without this, everything needs to move to the server side where data access frameworks like ADO.NET, Hibernate, etc. can be leveraged. The other half of this is the presentation tier, where the combination of JavaScript and CSS now allows HTML-based components to effectively expose an API that can be executed within a browser. This is in contrast to Portal technology, which is still a predominantly server-side technology. Effectively, JavaScript and CSS now allow a component-based model for web-based application development.

To make this more applicable in the corporate world, we need to look at the corporate problems. Many enterprise IT department are not creating applications for an end user on the internet, but rather for their own corporate employees. Frequently, these applications are used for simple tasks (think data entry) associated with the execution of a business process. Unfortunately, those applications take time to run. If they’re desktop applications, there’s probably a lot of bloat in them and they take a lot of time to startup. On the consumer side of things, I’ll use Quicken as an example. I may only need to enter one or two transactions, but I used to have to start the whole bloated application with all of its features to do so. Something that should take 30 seconds winds up taking 2-3 minutes.

Now, let’s enter the world of Widgets and Gadgets. It really started with a program called Konfabulator (which was eventually acquired by Yahoo), continued with Apple’s Dashboard, and most recently was continued with Microsoft Vista’s dashboard. Effectively, these platforms leverage DHTML, JavaScript, CSS, and if necessary, some platform specific APIs (mainly for saving preferences, but can be used to access local desktop resources), to present web-based applications that are very narrow in function. For example, the latest release of Quicken for the Mac included a Dashboard Widget that allows data entry. I no longer have to start all of Quicken simply to enter a transaction. This results in increased efficiencies. Because these Widgets and Gadgets are built using DHTML, JavaScript, and CSS, they can pull in data on the fly via XML over HTTP, instead of having the user navigate through endless pages to get to what they need to do. Furthermore, the platform integration allows data to be carried in to the widget and be “mashed” on the fly.

I believe these technologies have the most potential within the enterprise. I can’t drag an Word document into a browser window normally, but I can drag it onto on Apple Dashboard Widget (I don’t know about Vista Gadgets). Secondly, their lightweight nature and immediate access makes them extremely well-suited for workflow tasks. Theoretically, the widget itself could be embedded in a task notification message. The task manager for the user (which could be a widget/gadget as well, or it could be something like Outlook) would leverage the native HTML/CSS/JavaScript engine to generate the UI on the fly, pull in the data via XML/HTTP and allow the user to directly execute the task without all of the overhead of launching applications and navigating through web pages.

There are certainly still challenges that exist before this becomes mainstream, security being the largest, along with the risk of badly coded widgets consuming resources. If you’ve ever tried to do some AJAX programming and used timers, you’ll know that it’s easy to make a mistake and wind up with a ton of background HTTP calls trying to get XML data that just grinds the system to a halt. This is just the normal maturity curve for technology usage, however. As someone with interest in user productivity and efficiency, I’m excited about the opportunities that Widgets and Gadgets may provide for all of us, both corporate user and home user, in the future.

You can get a lot of blogging done in airports and on planes as evidenced by my output today. I’m currently listening to a great podcast from IT Conversations. This one is from the Adaptive Path series. It’s Lou Carbone, Founder, President, and Chief Experience Officer of Experience Engineering, Inc., speaking on Creating Customer Loyalty. Not only is he a great speaker with some great anecdotes, but the topic is very interesting, at least to me. Give it a listen.

Here’s a post from Innovations that nails it. It’s a discussion on Las Vegas, but the closing comments say it all, whether you’re designing a casino, a user interface, or services:

But our opinion doesn’t matter. What matters is the opinion of the customer, and it’s easy to marginalize or ignore that perspective in favor of seeing what we want to see. This is particularly true in technology product development, I believe, where the skill levels of the developers are leagues ahead of those of their ultimate customers. That’s one reason why software designers continue to add features to products when customers don’t use 80% of the features they already have. … Good product design means setting aside your biases and thinking like the customer, whether or not the customer is like you.

Well said.