Chapter Five: The Right Team
Technology is worthless unless it empowers the people who use it, so it makes sense to balance the needs of business, technology, and people. The problem is, these needs usually conflict, so the software development process often becomes a battle for control between business and technology.
Without the presence of designers and other professionals who have the expertise—and the responsibility—to think objectively and creatively about how to mediate those conflicts, either business or technology will “win” by forcing through a lopsided resolution. When there’s just one winner, everyone loses, but a process that seeks equilibrium among the needs of business, technology, and human beings can produce an outcome that produces substantial business benefits.
The first step is to ask what the business software needs to do.
Most executives, if asked to list the software tools they need to run their operations more effectively, could describe exactly what they want. In fact, every business leader who participates in the process of acquiring business software has experience in defining and specifyingthose requirements. So why is it that even businesses with extensive financial and technical resources have so much trouble getting the quality of software they need? The most common complaintI hear from executives goes something like this: “We asked our people to tell us what they wanted, and we built a system that does everything they said they needed, and now no one seems to like it. We’ve trained everyone on the system, and they’re still not using it. We can’t figure out what’s causing the problem.”
Usually, these systems do 80 percent of what people expect, but they don’t do it in the way that people expect. Almost always, what’s missingis sensitivity to the user interface, the point at which people touch the thing—consideration of whether the language displayed on the screen uses words and names that people recognize and whether information is organized in a way that’s clear and predictable.
