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.

 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

 As seen on smartplanet.com

According to Harold Hambrose, founder and CEO of the design consultancy Electronic Ink, the software you use may be causing delays, squelching innovation, lowering profits, and…if your business is health care, potentially endangering lives?

How? According to Hambrose’s new book “Wrench in the System” software that doesn’t communication clearly with the people who use it is a major problem.

Not just wreaking havoc but also costing business billions of dollars in waste. Hambrose, who helped design the interface for IBM’s OS/2 and has consulted for Fortune 500 companies such as British Petroleum, Comcast, McDonald’s and Research in Motion, is no stranger to design challenges.

So…with so much riding on the software in our daily lives I’ve asked Harold to spend some time with us.

Harold, How do we know when the software we are counting on us is actually hurting us?

We know it when the software makes a task so complicated that we avoid it; when it discourages good work and innovation, rather than encouraging it; when it puts us at risk. There are plenty of examples. The Northwest Airline pilots – two smart guys struggling with shift-scheduling software. Obviously, their timing was terrible – maybe criminal, but you have to wonder, “What was that front end like?”

 And with the increasing use of software applications in hospitals and insurance companies, every one of us now has a life-or-death stake in whether or not our medical records and other hospital technology can stand up to the realities of the emergency room, the operating room, and our local pharmacies.

How can we correct the problems? Any low cost solutions?

We correct software usability issues through a researched-based, user-centered design process led by trained designers. These aren’t just people with good taste and a sense of organization; they’re professionals who have made it their life’s work to understand how people interact with technology. They’re experienced at leading an organization through cycles of research, ideation, modeling, testing, and refinement to arrive at the best solution – a solution that is collaborative, fast and affordable.

We can usually find a design solution that will save our clients money and work within their budgets. We can jump in anywhere in the design process. Ideally, we like to be involved from the very beginning asking questions about the things that developers and stakeholders might not be thinking about yet. But improvements post launch are still incredibly effective. A professionally designed UI and information architecture can make a frustrating system much more user-friendly.

How can we reduce our training expenses?

By creating software that’s easier to use – that’s intuitive. You want to create software that mimics the way people work. They shouldn’t need a manual or have to memorize a set of instructions, and they shouldn’t have to reconceptualize how they do their job or learn new terms for the tasks they do every day.

Thoughtfully designed information architecture reduces training because it doesn’t ask people to reconceptualize their work, rename their activities, or learn a lot of configuration or workarounds. It’s simple and intuitive. That alone reduces training costs significantly.

What are some tips for the manager thinking about using software as a solution to a business problem?

Ignore your instinct to throw more technology and training at underperforming software. Take a step back and assess the situation. Does your software do what your users need it to do? Does it invite use or discourage it? If it discourages use, don’t assume you have to live with the system or buy a whole new one. Instead, realize that there are people out there – my company and lots of others too – who can come in, really listen to you and your users, and make what you have work.

Where’s this all going? How do we get smarter software and how does the social web fit in to innovation?

I believe software development should follow traditional product development. In traditional product development, you have to prove that a design is going to work before you expect a customer to buy it. Also in product design, the user is always at the forefront of the innovator’s mind. So it should be with software.

Smart software is software that reflects how we work and play. At the risk of sounding glib, I think we need as many anthropologists and artists involved in the software development process as there are data analysts and software engineers. Traditionally, software development happened in a vacuum, which invites narrow thinking and trouble.

People are using social software in all kinds of places: they want flexibility, accuracy, security – and even a little bit of fun. Obviously, social networking has opened the conversation to all types of people, which will open the door to new ideas. The challenge now is how to process all the diverse ideas and innovations to their best effect.

Thanks Harold!

by Vince Thompson

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

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.

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