Tag: Design

Designing a New Ball Game

Sometimes the solution to a business problem is in plain sight—but you may not be able to see it from behind your desk. Last spring a company that supplies food services to millions of people around the world mentioned to our team that they were interested in taking a closer look at one of theirRead More »

The Wisdom of the Widget Maker

Sometimes, in their rush to deliver data, companies that create electronic products lose track of important information about their customers that was routinely gathered by their industrial ancestors. The widget manufacturers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had a pretty good idea of how well their products fit an existing need and how well theyRead More »

Hire a Professional!

When a software system just isn’t delivering on its promise, one of the usual suspects is an awkward design that makes the system difficult to use. But if you’ve diagnosed the probable cause, what’s the remedy? Fine-tuning the design of business software is commonly treated as a troubleshooting issue that’s addressed after a system isRead More »

Crash Scene

Sometimes, when I’m called upon to investigate a business process that’s gone awry, I feel like a first responder arriving at the scene of a major traffic accident: The collisions that occur between idealized business processes and human nature can be pretty ugly. The good news is that many of these pileups can be prevented.Read More »

Lost in the Cloud

You’ll have to admit that it’s amazing—the way in which much of our everyday business software has floated away from local servers in the workplace and settled into the cloud. A few decades ago, business software was typically housed in a mainframe computer so gigantic that it needed its own office. As smaller central processingRead More »

Managing Risk

It’s not as though we hadn’t been thinking about risk management long before the earthquake and tsunami struck Japan. For most of us, risk is always top of mind because we continually face risk from every direction—the risk of change, the risk of maintaining the status quo, the risks posed by forces of nature, andRead More »

The Process of Innovation

The leaders of many companies recognize that their future success will be determined by their ability to do business differently from their competitors—to innovate. They’ve set high standards for the efficiency of their operations and the quality of their work, and they’ve checked those boxes. Now they’re asking themselves, Does our business actually work theRead More »

Design to Delight!

Why shouldn’t it be more fun to come to work? For many businesses, striving to create a great experience for the workforce just isn’t part of the corporate culture. Cynics will argue that you can never make people happy, and that even if you could grant every wish, it’s not realistic for most businesses toRead More »

…and the Winner Is:

I don’t know about you, but every year around this time I come down with a case of awards fatigue, starting last month with the Consumer Electronics Show and followed by the Golden Globes, the Grammys, and the Academy Awards—and those are just the entertainment awards! Nearly every industry honors its outstanding performers. So whyRead More »

The People Behind User-Centered Design

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.Read More »