The Last Word

Last summer, I experienced Facebook overload. I was at the grocery store with my daughter when I received a call from a relative who knew exactly where I was and what I was doing when I answered the phone. I was picking up picnic ingredients—nothing terribly interesting—so it was surprising to discover that someone unexpected knew this information. When I asked my caller how she knew all of this, she said that she had read it on my daughter’s Facebook page. A pre-teen daughter, a laptop, and a leading social networking tool—that’s all that was needed to remove any last shred of privacy I might have had on that summer morning.

My daughter and her aunt had just engaged in a complex act of communication involving a remote server, applications accessed by Web and mobile phone, and data transmitted by wireless routers. Neither of them had training to learn how to do any of this. Nonetheless, the human desire to communicate was satisfied by powerful, well-designed computer technology. Despite my annoyance, I still noticed the sharp contrast between this typical experience with social media and what we confront when we face the technology of industry. Consider, for example, my visit last summer to the doctor’s office.

After the doctor entered the exam room where I was freezing and alone for so long that I thought I’d been forgotten, he sat in a chair opposite mine and placed an open laptop on a stool between us. Then something strange happened. Looking intently at his computer screen, he began to ask a series of sensitive questions. Why was I there? How was I feeling generally? What was the cause of my mother’s early death? Were my daughters in good health? He barely looked up from his typing. I couldn’t help but wonder, would he hear any hesitation in my voice? Would he recognize fear in my eyes? Would he ever be done with that damn computer!? I work in the technology industry and can appreciate his commitment to recording information accurately. But as a patient, I was bothered by this laptop and how it distracted him from really hearing my answers. How would a technophobe feel about this situation? And how might it affect the quality of care?

What makes Facebook, Twitter, and similar products successful is their design. They are easy to use and elegant in their simplicity. These design considerations were evidently absent from the technology product my doctor was using.

When I was a design student in a studio atop the winding staircase in Baker Hall, I learned that the best designs came from equal measures of what I knew about design and what I understood about the people for whom I was designing. For the past 20 years, I have been sending designers into all sorts of complicated places—prisons, private homes, government offices, manufacturing plants, executive suites, hospitals, banks, brokerage houses, and even baseball parks. There, these designers learn to understand both the people and the contexts for which they are designing. In my world, engineering begins with understanding people—their needs, expectations, and goals in a variety of circumstances.

As seen on design.cmu.edu

“A fine new book examines why B2B software doesn’t work the way you want It to”, says Martin Veitch

It’s always nice to get a surprise at Christmas, even if it does come through the unglamorous process of digging through the CIO slush piles for volumes worthy of the editorial eye. This time, we pulled out a plum in this terrific book by the founder of a US-based design agency examining the vexed question of why business software tends to disappoint.

It’s a question that most of us have given up trying to answer. Because the wrong supplier got chosen? Because IT has no idea about business? Because business has no idea about IT? Because the wording of the RFP was bad? Because things changed partway through the selection or development process? Who knows, so we shrug and creep from project hell to the new world… of what also turns out to be project hell.

All of these attempted answers have some validity but it’s rare for a writer to come up with such a cogent, trenchant polemic as Hambrose manages here. As you might expect, Hambrose focuses on software design, suggesting that software given to users all too often fails to reflect the way they work or want to work. So it falls into disuse, is detested or management comes up with some spurious justification for the enormous amount of money invested in it.

The sums are huge, of course, and I’m sure I’m not alone in surveying the chaos and vast sums and half expecting to see the Mad Hatter arrive for a tea party. Hambrose comes to our collective rescue with an attempt to explain the problem and suggestions for fixing it. His call is for better understanding of human behavior and roles and for meshing business process experts, designers and technologists. It’s an argument that might sound familiar – clichéd even – but the devil is in the detail and Hambrose articulates that detail well.

What is attractive here is that Hambrose doesn’t put himself in a particular camp. He is as fiercely critical of design snobs as of anybody else, recalling artistic types at agencies who cared more about injecting their personalities into designs than making them usable.

As well as being a fine read, this is a painstakingly, rather wonderfully, illustrated book.

In order to accommodate Hambrose, we had to forsake our round-up of CIO’s best books of the year. But there’s enough space here to point out the best ones:

How The Mighty Fall by Jim Collins is a useful study of why good companies go bad.

The Perfect Fit by Ed Grimshaw is a timely critique of the hiring process.

India’s Global Powerhouses (various authors) is an eye-opening analysis of how fast the global economy is swinging back to the BRIC countries and India in particular – and not just in the technology sector.

The Adventures Of An IT Leader is a novel (in both senses of the word) fictionalised story of a first-time CIO, drafted in from outside of technology.

What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis takes the search giant’s philosophy and applies it to everything else.

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell sees the little master of business/sociology/psychology/statistics take on the reasons for individual success unconvincingly but entertainingly. And entertainment is what’s important at this time of year, isn’t it?

Source: CIO UK December 2009 (www.cio.co.uk)

 by Mark Kobayashi-Hillary

Mark Kobayashi-Hillary speaks to Electronic Ink CEO Harold Hambrose about how essential good software design is to an organisation’s success – and what we must change to get it right.

Do you remember the shocking news from October this year about a Northwest Airlines flight where the pilots apparently fell asleep and overshot their destination by hundreds of miles, before waking and taking control?

They safely landed the plane but an immediate investigation was launched to find out what happened.

Being a frequent flyer myself, I’d hastily chosen to forget about this story until I had lunch recently with Harold Hambrose, CEO of design firm Electronic Ink.

Stumbling along
We met on the fringes of a conference in London because I wanted to discuss Hambrose’s book about software design, Wrench in the System (Wiley 2009). The book explores the idea that poor design actually sabotages business software and makes it close to useless.

Hambrose speculated that the Northwest pilots were not sleeping; he claims they were probably grappling with some poorly designed navigation software and lost track of time. It sounds plausible and somewhat more comforting than merely snoozing pilots – but with the investigation ongoing we can only guess at what really happened.

Software design may have played a key role for those pilots that day. But I asked Hambrose how design fits into the world of technology for the rest of us.

He explained: “There are many major systems that are engineering marvels but design failures. It’s indicative of technology in general and how it has developed. Look back at something like the early automobiles – they were so dangerous, you were taking your life in your hands when driving one. We are kind of at that stage still with a lot of the software systems we use, still stumbling along.”

Cloud success
I asked him what he thought of the success of Salesforce.com – because it’s such a major subversion of the IT department, with users paying for their own systems with their own budget.

He said: “What’s cool about human beings is that they will find the easiest path. If it’s too difficult, they will work around it. The great thing about Salesforce.com is that they recognise training is not an option. You want to send your sales people on a course teaching them to sell better, not how to use the CRM software tools.”

But these days everyone is designing software as a service (SaaS) and cloud-based products, so it must be a lot easier to incorporate good design into those systems. At least a lot easier than it used to be when software was shrink-wrapped and installed locally. Right?

Hambrose said: “Well Cloud, SaaS and virtualisation are important. I’ve seen people reading the books and saying, ‘Yes we have solved the usability problem because we are now going to deliver our products inside a web browser’. That doesn’t automatically fix anything. You have the same cast of characters doing the same thing but inside what they perceive as an innovative environment. That doesn’t make it an attractive product.”

COMMENT

Design before build
During our lunch, Hambrose described to me how modern buildings require the input of architects, psychologists, anthropologists and designers before the first brick is laid. This is all to ensure the building is not just functional but works in a way that makes the users comfortable and even happy.

I asked: Why don’t we build enterprise software like that?

He said: “We do. I’ve got a hundred people doing it but it’s still really new. The engineers still own the keys to the kingdom, sometimes even to the point at which the business comes second. Slowly we are getting to the point where it is now obvious to people that if we are really going to leverage on engineering advancements, then we need to employ the disciplines that have made systems work better in other industries.”

Thanks, consumer tech
Then Hambrose made what I consider to be a key point about enterprise systems and why users are running out of patience. “It’s really thanks to Facebook and online banking. People go into work in the morning and look at their enterprise software and ask difficult questions like ‘Hey, I can’t even enter my time on this system but I can go home and balance my stock portfolio online,’” he said.

To me this is one of the fundamental gripes around enterprise systems. Why are they just so dated when we have all this innovative stuff available on the web?

I used to work in a bank and the traders would forever be downloading and installing their own applications – tools that worked better than the ones the company was giving them.

What could the IT team do? Every attempt to lock down the desktop was met with the traders reminding anyone who would listen that they were a profit centre and everyone else was there to support them.

Survival skills
All of which led me back to speaking to Hambrose about the real world – the one mired in recession. What role does good design play when so many businesses are just trying to survive this economic downturn?

He said: “Over the last couple of years, design has been tied much closer to survival. CIOs are thinking, ‘I bought the $300m system and no one is using it. How do I maintain some credibility?’ If people don’t have any more budget to buy stuff but they want to get their existing systems to work better, they can work with designers to change and improve what they have.”

Hambrose told me he has had a few calls from CIOs recently, where they want to talk about the design of a new system before the software team has even been called in.

He said it’s the first time this has started happening – and I can believe it. Perhaps what it really means is that the people who commission large software systems are finally calling in the architect before the builder.

As seen on silicon.com

From Philly.com

Try this: Go to the Web site of the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics – www.bls.gov – and find unemployment figures for Upper Darby.

Easy? Not. The numbers are there; the site is a treasure trove. But chances are you’ll get bogged down in screen after screen of forms and codes that could choke a macroeconomist.

This isn’t to pick on the bureau, but to say huzzah to the message in Harold Hambrose’s Wrench in the System. Technologists do the heavy lifting on most business software, and, as Hambrose explains, “a technologist’s first loyalty is to the code, not the customer.” The Dilbert comic strip has been making that point for a long time.

Wrench is an entertaining argument for a much greater role for designers, psychologists, even anthropologists in creating the complex and all-too-frequently bewildering software used by businesses.

It shouldn’t surprise that author Hambrose is a design consultant, founder and chief executive officer of the Philadelphia design firm Electronic Ink.

The bone – or wrench – he has to pick with the software industry generally, and business software in particular, is that programmers and technologists unwittingly sabotage their wizardly computer code and cool hardware by failing to factor in, or even consult, we the people who’ll be clackety-clacking at keyboards and trying to make sense of what we’ve been handed.

It is as if no one had bothered to ask, “What does this thing need to do?” writes Hambrose.

Look at your own workspace, or your office neighbor’s. Hambrose says that if the computer screen and desk are littered with Post-it notes and cheat sheets of password reminders, keystroke combinations, emergency procedures and such, you’re likely a victim of software that skipped any meaningful prototype stage on its way to your desktop.

Unlike many other large-scale efforts – say, construction of Manhattan’s Chrysler building, or production of the first model of the luxury Lexus automobile – when it comes to software, serious thought about how it looks or how people will use it can remain an afterthought, if that.

Everybody’s forgetting to draw up a blueprint, according to Hambrose.

Maybe that’s why a generation of Windows users had to click on “start” to shut off the computer. At my desk, you won’t intuitively “print” from several of the programs furnished by global software giants that should know better. One program menu requires me to know that “proof object” means to print. Another calls on me to find and press the “simulate button” as a precursor to printing.

“Perhaps no reflection of our nature could be more distorted than one projected by a typical computer system,” Hambrose writes.

Hambrose tells how he and a colleague, with 20 years’ experience between them in the use of Microsoft Word, struggled for hours to format a graphic into a presentation due to a client worth possibly millions of dollars in new business.

They certainly aren’t alone. Last summer, my wife felt punished to tears during a college course on the feature-laden Office suite from Microsoft, with its 10-ton toolbars.

That’s a personal aggravation. Businesses waste millions to buy, install, and upgrade software that is either underused or ignored. Implementation costs, writes Hambrose, can run to twice the purchase price of software itself. On top of that, there’s lost worker time and productivity as employees try to do their jobs despite glitches, jury-rigged workarounds, and frequent calls to the help desk.

This should not be, writes Hambrose, whose company has revamped public and private Web interfaces, such as one for local company Traffic.com, as well as a front end for the data warehouse at Philadelphia’s Rohm & Haas, and the look and feel of the big-screen, war-room-style software used by the Valley Forge-based PJM Interconnection to monitor the real-time flow of electricity in the grid serving 13 states.

Innovation, he writes, “is the difference between asking what needs to be done and asking how it might be done better.”

Reviewed by Reid Kanaley

As seen on itbuessnessedge.com

Every year, businesses waste billions of dollars on information technology that doesn’t communicate clearly with the people who use it. This fundamental flaw causes errors and delays, lowers profits, and can even endanger lives.

In the book “Wrench in the System: What’s Sabotaging Your Business Software and How You Can Release the Power to Innovate,” technology designer Harold Hambrose shows executives and managers how to turn underperforming digital assets into powerhouse systems—how to specify small changes that dramatically boost productivity, how to reduce training costs, and how to ask vendors the right questions.

Wrench in the System reveals:

• Why so many of our essential software systems are needlessly confusing.
• How to make low-cost changes that provide direct, measurable benefits.
• The hidden costs of forcing people to adapt to clumsy electronic tools.
• The secrets of matching software to the needs of the company.
• How to leverage the power of technology for innovation.

The attached Zip file includes:
• Intro Page.doc
• Cover Sheet and Terms.pdf
• Wrench in the System Excerpt.pdf

Wrench In The System Excerpt.ZIP

by Patrick Avery

Wrench In The System By Harold Hambrose

What’s Sabotaging Your Business Software And How You Can Release The Power To Innovate

Read the full review

Every year businesses waste billions of pounds, not by squandering money on private jets or bonus schemes, but by using products that drain productivity and reduce profitability – defective SOFTWARE.

In his groundbreaking new book, Wrench In The System, author and designer Harold Hambrose demonstrates how smart businesses can make massive savings by creating and using software that communicates clearly and simply with the people who use it. By making basic design companywide and significantly reduce training costs in the process…

Here is a brief video of Harold Hambrose discussing his book and some helpful advice for small to medium sized companies.

Read the full article at freshbusinessthinking.com

Fixing Software

From the  October 9, 2009 Vol.31 Issue 25 of Processor

Computer Software is among some of the most intricate and elaborate creations—complexity that’s likely the root of why it’s so failure-prone, hard to use, quirky, and rife with security holes. Yet is software really so different from other inventions? Is it inherently more byzantine than a jetliner, automobile, or even cell phone? Or is the problem more that standard software development practices just haven’t matured?

Harold Hambrose, in “Wrench in the System,” argues the latter: that software systems aren’t subjected to the same rigorous, formalized design and specification processes as their physical counterparts. “It’s just a product—a man-made tool that is developed, manufactured, marketed, licensed, and sold,” he says. Yet there’s one key difference: “We have come to accept that the software we use won’t work in the way we expect.”…

“Wrench in the System” is an insightful examination of the problems with today’s software systems and ways to improve them. Hambrose’s design perspective is a refreshing alternative to the conventional software development wisdom and should serve as a manifesto for those trying to improve the quality and usability of business applications.

by Kurt Marko

Review of Wrench in the System: What’s Sabotaging Your Business Software

By Jeff Cogswell

This is a beautiful hardcover book printed on glossy pages with full-color photos, and the author says exactly what’s been on my mind for a long time. When I was into the first chapter, I grabbed a highlighter, thinking I’d copy a paragraph or two for this article, but I soon found I was highlighting the entire book.

The first chapter starts right out talking about how so much software has turned into lemons—yet, unlike other products, we can’t just send it back for a refund. The author points out, “If you pay more than $25 for almost any product that doesn’t work properly despite its written warranty, the Magnuson-Moss Act will back you in court … which enables buyers to obtain satisfaction for goods that fail to perform…” But this doesn’t apply to software, thanks to the licensing agreements. He adds: “The owner of a $15 million software product that turns out to be too difficult to use has much less chance of obtaining a refund or a replacement than the buyer of a defective DustBuster.” Put simply (and these are my words, not the author’s): If the software sucks, you’re screwed.

Much of the book is devoted to good design in software. But design here means not just the architecture we programmers usually think of when we hear “design” but also the outer cover, the GUI, the thing the user sees and interacts with when using your software. Does the software actually do what it’s supposed to do without forcing the users to jump through hoops, and without slowing them down?

We’ve heard it before, yet so many of us refuse to listen. Good design matters.

And the good news with this book is that while pointing out the problems in so much software, Hambrose offers good, solid solutions for how you can improve your software. You won’t find any actual code in this book; in fact, Hambrose’s formal education is in design and not programming. But that’s actually good. They say that if you want to know what you’re really like, don’t look in the mirror but instead ask other people. Other people see things about us that we don’t see. And the same is true with an industry. With this book, we have an intelligent outsider who has stepped into our industry to provide us with what he sees is a fundamental problem. Sometimes that’s what it takes to kick us into high gear. But he’s not just an outside complaining; rather, he’s spent many years now immersed in our industry and is now a part of it, and offers excellent solutions that we would be wise to follow.

Will we learn from this? Will our software finally become usable? I certainly hope so. We can all start by picking up a copy of Wrench in the System by Harold Hambrose.

-Jeff Cogswell

From a Computerworld review on October 5, 2009.

Book review: What’s wrong with software development

Wrench in the System has one powerful message: We’re building our software enterprise applications all wrong. . . . Businesses need software “that sparks excitement in its target community of human users–excitement that their work is easier and more enjoyable, that they have become more effective, and that their employer is supplying tools that make them feel like part of a winning team.” We have a long way to go.

                       –Mitch Betts, Computerworld, October 5, 2009