Panel Discussion
7 July 2010
Cass Business School, London
www.electronicink.com/cass

Join senior executives from the energy, pharmaceutical, healthcare, and financial industries as well as leading professional services firms to debate the role of Design in business. Learn about the competitive edge Design affords successful companies and its impact on business transformation and the bottom line. Participants will hear how global corporations which have already implemented design thinking have achieved significant results.

Electronic Ink and Cass Business School will offer a lively debate moderated by David Rowan, Editor of the award-winning magazine WIRED. Join us afterwards for Q&A, drinks, and conversation. The panel members include:

• Dr. Sara Jones, City University London, RCUK Research Fellow Creativity Applied to Design and Engineering, School of Informatics

• Conrad Troy, Lead Partner IT Enabled Business Transformation at KPMG

• Dave Weller, Chief Enterprise Architect of Thomson Reuters, former CTO of Factiva

• Harold Hambrose, founder and CEO of Electronic Ink, a leading user-centric business systems design company, author of Wrench in the System

• Henry Dodds, Operations Director, Nomura International PLC

Successful organizations are starting to balance technological know-how and business acumen with a genuine commitment to Design. Thoughtful, intentional design is essential for the usability of an enterprise system and can drastically improve user adoption. With a fairly modest investment, existing business systems can often be made substantially more effective through user-friendly design. Companies that acknowledge and embrace a partnership between technology and design will be better equipped to meet the challenges of the future.

On Tuesday, February 23, Electronic Ink founder and CEO Harold Hambrose enjoyed a warm reception at his alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Hambrose was back at the Pittsburgh-based institution to take part in the Carnegie Mellon School of Design Lectures series. 

Speaking to an audience gathered at Giant Eagle Auditorium, Hambrose displayed his trademark enthusiasm and humor as he continued his campaign for Design’s rightful place in the development of new, usable technology and business systems.  

Sharing both anecdotes from his 20 years  growing Electronic Ink, and observations from his recent book, Wrench in the System (Wiley 2009),  Hambrose pointed out that industry now turns to design as a source of innovation – in business operations and in the tools that support the execution of business. His message was warmly received by CMU’s latest batch of aspiring designers as well as their colleagues from many other of the University’s departments.

This isn’t Hambrose’s first trip back to Carnegie Mellon. In 2005, he was on campus to receive the Carnegie Mellon Merit Award from the university’s Alumni Association for his leadership and contribution to the technology industry. The award acknowledged that Hambrose and his company have pushed the influence of designers and the design process from the visual design of early computer desktops, through leadership in user centered design practices, to the modeling of complex business operations and the systems that will be the backbone of business transformation.

Hambrose and Electronic Ink continue to cultivate their relationship with CMU students, graduates and faculty. This is just one of many ways, Hambrose says he keeps Electronic Ink on the cutting edge.

I would like to believe that when pilots are locked into the cockpit of a commercial airline and we’re thousands of feet above ground traveling hundreds of miles an hour that these folks are focused completely on the task at hand. Recent developments with a  flight bound for Minneapolis have revealed a disturbing picture not just of momentary distraction – but rather of complete off-the-job behavior that had the aircraft over-shoot its destination by more than a hundred miles. 

Of course, the scandal-driven media wanted the story – what was going on in that cockpit that had these two highly trained professionals completely checked-out of the task at hand? Were they asleep? Drunk? Or up to something really interesting? Come on – lots of you were wondering! It turns out, that these highly trained professionals with thousands of hours of commercial flying time, in the confines of that tiny room, gave in to temptation, and quite unwisely decided to whip out their—laptops!

Apparently, both men made the decision to take out their laptops and engage in a bit of an in-flight software training session. Supposedly, the co-pilot was providing the pilot with a tutorial on how to use the airline’s new scheduling software. Ignoring the fact that these guys were flying a plane with a hundred or more innocent lives quite literally in the palms of their hands (and I know, that’s a lot to ask) what these men say they were doing is something that  goes on in businesses every hour of every day . In virtually every industry,  professionals waste time muddling through their employer’s latest required, poorly designed systems instead of doing what they’ve been trained and hired to do. Who of us has not stolen a rare, deserted moment at the workplace to buttonhole a coworker for help with software? If we’re lucky, we find an intern or an ally – someone who won’t tell everyone how “bad” we are at the latest way to log in hours, recognize revenue, or generate our latest sales projections.

Who knows? By the time you’re reading this, the entire story could have changed, and this rather dull explanation of inexcusably careless behavior will prove to be a complete falsehood—but to my point—it’s not an unbelievable one. 

Experience Clarity: work with real designers for systems that really work.

I’d like to share my response to comments on my interview with CIO.com:

Thank you for your passionate responses to this subject. Upon reflection, I probably started off my interview painting with too broad a brush. The definition of a business analyst deserves more discussion and analysis than I offered. Maybe I can clarify my position and we can continue the conversation. I take your point – “business analyst” means different things to different people, and on top of that, it’s a continually evolving role.

In fact, much of what’s been said in the CIO.com blog captures my sense of the business analyst pretty accurately. The business analyst brings considerable skill, talent and creativity to the development of an application on behalf of the business stakeholders—not on behalf of the user.

For example, the entry dated April 28, 2008, titled What Do Business Analysts Actually Do for Software Implementation Projects, runs through a list that resonates with my own experience with BAs:  they “interpret business needs” help “spell out project details and requirements,” and “represent project stakeholders throughout the process.”  The BA’s role can continue right up through user acceptance testing – but don’t be deceived: UAT is not usability testing. It does not observe whether or not the application works easily, intuitively or well for end users in the workplace.

More recently, the CIO.com blog noted that the business analyst role is evolving, (Business Analysts: Role Changes Require New Skill Sets). This evolving role, according to a recent Forrester survey and analysis, includes working within different development methods, like Agile, but again, it doesn’t suggest any growth that would consider the end user to any greater degree.

In my experience, business analysts do not focus on the needs and goals of an end user – that person who is going to have to use the technology to get his or her job done in a setting that has its own constraints and demands, be it the factory floor, an emergency room, or the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange.

That is why I say that a business analyst cannot take the place of a designer. Think of design as something that includes but is much more than aesthetics. Designers are trained to investigate, understand, and translate to both business stakeholders and developers the language, culture, and context into which the proposed tool is going to be injected. What are the user’s expectations? What pressures do they operate under and what expectations must they meet? What are the limitations under which this tool is going to have to operate?

For a long time, software developers have been under the impression that usability practices constitute “good design.” Although usability is a necessary outcome of any successful design exercise, excellent design cannot be guaranteed from the execution of usability practices alone. Usability must be done within the design process and early enough to influence and guide development.

True design, the kind I advocate (the only kind of design in my book), incorporates the concerns of usability professionals into a process that includes defining the problem, exploring solutions, validating the proposed design solution, and supporting its implementation.

Usability is nothing new to software development. For twenty years, I have seen software products developed with at least some concern for what business sponsors and programmers have called usability. Most of the time this concern is addressed through the employment of a “Usability Professional” or the execution of usability testing, user interface design standards, and adherence to countless documented usability best practices. These usability professionals issue reports of observed difficulties and, if the developer is lucky, provide a reference to some documented best practice.

Usability practices incorporated within a true design process do more than just report errors or quantify their severity. The usability I’m talking about empowers quick and effective alternative designs that solve usability problems.

The most sophisticated usability lab in the world can serve no meaningful purpose if it is used only as a means of identifying problems. Moreover, usability methods applied after code has been written offer too little, too late. They miss the opportunity for meaningful changes to the user interface before expensive software development. People have been saying this for years now.

Usability practices alone don’t necessarily guarantee a well-designed product. I think of them as necessary, but not sufficient.

No matter how you cut it, an assembly of displays presenting data and application features represents a product. As a product, SaaS (Software as a Service) applications possess a certain physical form that either enhances or inhibits a human end user’s ability to perform a certain task.

A SaaS product is a piece of software that end users purchase access to, rather than purchase to install on their computer. A wildly successful example is Salesforce.com-a software tool that allows a company’s sales professionals access to Saleforces’ features and functions, and the company’s own sales data wherever there is an internet connection. This means salespeople who are on the road most of the time can update the company’s sales data real-time from the road. It also means that the company no longer has to wrestle with software upgrades and data integrity issues related to individual physical computers (e.g., salespeople updating files once they are back in the office).

“We’re running a SaaS model now, so changing the product’s user interface is a snap. We can change it every day if we need to. So we don’t have to worry about usability problems anymore.”

This evolutionary quality is a welcome change for software companies whose previous product release schedules were plagued by missed release dates and grandiose unveilings that often disappointed customers. SaaS applications can be updated incrementally and deliver new features and user interface designs to end users whenever they log in. This capability has given some folks in the SaaS world the impression that these products are immune from the usability and user adoption problems that plagued their browser-based and client-server predecessors. Unless design and design process drive the evolutionary changes of products, changes may keep genuine innovation and improvement from being a reality in this new world.

Once again, it sounds like a new technological capability is being mistaken for design and design process-things that are painfully rare in the software world.

I just want to put out a quick call for participation to everyone. I am going to be posting my thoughts about design and business to this site periodically, in hopes of starting a conversation about the topics in the book.

But the beauty of a blog is that it needn’t be one-sided. I hope you’ll post your own comments and thoughts here, too. After all, the book is just a starting point. Let’s continue the discussion.

– Harold Hambrose