months . New signals are evolving that contain crucial information about companies and markets – including sensor-laden assets, unstructured internal data and external sentiments shared via social computing.
Data volumes continue to explode, doubling every 14
And it is providing a rich source of insight on market positioning, consumer sentiment and employee productivity. By applying search, pattern matching and sophisticated analytics to these structured and unstructured reservoirs of social data, organisations can position themselves to better understand their customers’ perceptions, their employees’ experiences and the problems that should be demanding corporate attention.
Software engineering has typically emphasised technical architectural ‘-ilites’ – reliability, scalability, security, maintainability and flexibility. At the same time, low expectations were set for the other ‘-ilities’ – namely, ‘usability’ or employee interactions with enterprise technologies. While people grumbled about the systems they relied on for daily tasks, there were few examples of any better systems, and little impetus for corporate solution developers to implement change.
Fast-forward to today’s knowledge workers who are dependent on an average of six systems to do their jobs and little tolerance for difficulty with them. For these workers, the rise of consumer and Internet technologies has raised expectations for IT tools at work. And the rise of a technology- savvy workforce represents an opportunity to empower employees to find new insights, to continuously improve how business occurs, to engage customers to grow revenue and to build your brand at customer touch points.
Seizing these opportunities requires solutions designed with user engagement in mind, and a focus on users and roles that brings together whatever resources an individual needs to perform their work. Usability becomes a cornerstone of design. It is represented by;
- Intuitiveness – simple, easy-to-understand, following consumer-design conventions for layout and flow.
- Interoperability – User engagement looks to build solutions that systematically handle end-to-end integration, instead of forcing users to alt-tab. - Aggregation – the ability to correlate and expose relationships in information that can allow users to expedite tasks and engage in higher-order reasoning around the business problem. - Portability – creating a seamless, controlled experience for employees to perform business tasks on their second and third screens (mobile devices, home PCs and televisions). - Outside-in – proactively designing solutions with the expectation of collaborating with external resources, instead of assuming the transaction will take place within company walls.
The rise of mobile computing is staggering in sheer scale and in its breadth of adoption – crossing age groups, economic classes and geographies. Consumer interest in smartphones, tables and untraditional connected devices such as set-top boxes, telematics, video games and embedded appliances is growing faster than with any other product segment, with a projected growth of 36% in the coming year.
As new devices find their way into the hands of business stakeholders, organisations are realising how powerful a mobile presence at the edge of their enterprise can be. The underlying network, form factor, user interface and raw device computing power are necessary enabler, but what really matters is harnessing these features into rich, yet simple and intuitive apps to solve real business problems.
64 Management Today | December 2011
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