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 »
Tag: Software
Hire a Professional!
May 3rd, 2011
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
April 26th, 2011
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 »
Avoiding Buyer’s Remorse
April 19th, 2011
Even though we know better, we’ve all done it: finding ourselves falling so hard for some sleek new marvel of engineering that we don’t take enough time to think it through. When a cell phone purchased on impulse doesn’t fit our needs quite as well as we expected, we can replace it this afternoon andRead More »
Lost in the Cloud
April 12th, 2011
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 »
Portable Data: What Have You Got to Lose?
April 5th, 2011
Yet another wakeup call was sounded to every business that maintains confidential records (that would be all of us) when British Petroleum acknowledged last week that the company had lost track of a laptop containing the names, Social Security numbers, addresses, and phone numbers of 13,000 Louisiana residents who had filed claims for compensation forRead More »
When Bad Software Goes Mobile
March 1st, 2011
One problem that many businesses are grappling with is how to untether their essential software systems from desktops. The rapid migration of business systems from desktops to iPads and other tablet technologies conspicuously illustrates the axiom by American journalist H. L. Mencken that “for every complex problem there’s a solution that’s simple, obvious, and wrong.”Read More »
…and the Winner Is:
February 23rd, 2011
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
June 15th, 2010
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 »
A funny thing happened on the way to a SaaS model
July 8th, 2009
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.
