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.
“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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.” Read more »
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.
I think most vendors want to get the level of detail and “design approach” offered by Mr. Hambrose. However, I think sales teams arrive with a solution to the problem that has a name. When a prospect goes out to purchase a CRM solution, they normally start with a list of requirements and a short list of vendors. The challenge right out of the gate is the requirements list – it does not have enough detail and does not really describe what the customer wants. Read more »
“Making computer information easily available to people in their work can help organizations meet their most important goals. This book recommends adopting traditional methods and procedures of design to do so, and suggests that turning data into accessible information could be a high calling for designers now. I wish we designers were as wise as the author considers us! But we, as much as computer users in business, can learn deep lessons from his confrontation of the challenges of information design today, and his demonstration of how our own techniques can apply to meeting them.” — Denise Scott Brown, Principal, Venturi Scott Brown and Associates, and co-author, Learning from Las Vegas
