Archive for the ‘Web 2.0’ Category
As Long as It’s Gray
It’s a bit late for an April Fools’ Day post, but it’s always nice to end a workweek with a little fun, don’t you think?
I’ve talked a lot about the drab look of enterprise applications. Most corporate-ware simply looks unfinished to me. I’m surprised by companies that will pay millions for fancy office space, but won’t spend a little extra to make their internal applications a little more pleasant to use.
But then I saw an article on Read Write Web reviewing an application that touted its battleship gray color scheme as a feature. No kidding: Waste company time without getting caught using FaceoffIM. It’s corporate camouflage in action!
FaceoffIM: Ugly is the new social?
Battleship gray, indeed. Why fight grim a corporate culture when you can employ a little subterfuge?
You get what (someone else) paid for
Dean’s post about the impending failure of Enterprise 2.0 got me thinking a lot about the strange nature of selling enterprise software, and of selling things in general.
Okay, so imagine you walk down to the local store and buy a lollipop, which you then proceed to happily lick all the way home. In this instance, you’re the purchaser and the consumer. You have a direct relationship with the company that makes the candy. You buy it, so you are funding their existence, and you eat it, so you are also the direct judge of the effectiveness or quality of their product.
This direct relationship is exactly what happens when people buy products for themselves. Per sale, the company has one customer, and that leads to the product being developed and grown with a linear relationship — feedback from customers is meaningful, and important. It’s this model which led to “The customer is always right” — after all, you’re not going to argue with your customers. If your latest Snozzberry flavored candy isn’t selling well, it’s safe to assume it’s because consumers are not fond of it. Hits and misses become immediately apparent. An increase in purchases can be attributed directly to an increase in satisfaction.
Me and My Shadow - Combined Purchaser and Customer
Sadly, the world isn’t often this simple. There are many situations when the consumer and the purchaser are different people. Let’s consider the scenario where your twelve-year-old daughter is trying to convince you that she really needs those designer sneakers.
In this instance, the consumer and the purchaser are different. You won’t be wearing the sneakers, so your criteria for purchase is likely to be much different from your daughter’s. As the purchaser, you’ll be looking at price, and value for money. You might be looking for things like good quality stitching, materials or the country of origin. Your daughter, on the other hand, doesn’t care about any of those things. She only cares that they are awesome and that her friends will be soooo jealous.
The sneaker company has a dilemma – to optimize the product for purchase by parents, or for its appeal to teenagers? An increase in sales may not actually indicate satisfied customers (as any kid who was forced to wear sensible school shoes can attest). Per sale, the sneaker company has two customers to keep happy here. And the criteria for success are different.
Split Personality - What if the purchaser isn't the consumer?
If push comes to shove, and the shoe company has to decide between a feature that delights a teenager or a requirement that satisfies her parents, we know which ones will appear in the final product. He who pays the piper calls the tune.
The other shoe drops
If the central tenet of Web 2.0 is, in Tim O’Reilly’s words, that “users add value,” a Web 2.0 company wants as many users as they can possibly attract. To build the largest audience for their Web 2.0 tools, these hot new companies developed a razor-sharp focus on the user experience. Every other imperative — including profitability — was secondary.
The wave of innovation that followed was all about design. Simple, attractive, usable and useful sites sprang up everywhere. Emergent, free-form sites that generated communities and empowered individual users.
All of this was possible because the customer was the user. Individuals could vote with their feet — or their wallet — for the solutions that worked for them.
When Web 2.0 software gets translated to the corporate environment, where the customer is not the user, you have to be extremely careful that the features that get cut aren’t the ones that employees were clamoring for in the first place. Did you sacrifice an intuitive user interface because it didn’t match the look and feel of your company’s intranet? Did you substitute free-flowing, spontaneous conversation for a lengthy edit-and-approve cycle? Whoops. You just forced your 2.0 employees back into a 1.0 solution.
It’s no wonder that most users in the enterprise are wearing uncomfortable, tight-fitting sensible shoes.
Open the doors and see all the people
Brynn Evans pointed me to an intriguing piece of future gazing from Chris Messina and Jyri Engeström – The Web at a New crossroads. In it, they describe the evolution of the internet from a document-centric content sharing mechanism, through to the way we see it today – with the emergence of people-centric media solutions like Facebook and Twitter increasingly taking a prominent role.
It’s a well thought out and innately resonant concept – we are currently at a stage in the web’s development where people are sufficiently acclimatized to the technology, and the technologists are realizing what personal elements are required to bring people into the web – offering elements that are innately social and vital to the way that humans behave. As Clay Shirky puts it, “Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.” Hence the dawn of what Messina and Engeström are calling “The people-centric Web”.
Among my circle of friends, there are few who aren’t on Facebook. And those few who aren’t, are missing out on the conversations, the lame jokes, the cat pictures, and all the stuff that goes on in social circles– for whatever reason, they’re not at the party. If there’s one thing that people fear, it’s being left out – solitary confinement is the single worst kind of punishment dealt out by the human race. As the web becomes more and more socially interesting, it seems likely that the kinds of pressures that we impose on ourselves as a society – pressure to be seen, to contribute value, and to achieve will continue to manifest more and more as part of the social web.
So where does that leave the content?
Work is different from play. In recreational social circles, the social objects –the things we’re talking about – often take a back seat to the fact that people are talking about them. A Facebook conversation about, say, Keyboard Cat, provides a mechanism for the conversation participants to engage and jest – the content itself is not of particular importance. Social systems grow based on the actions of the contributors, not on the artifacts or information that catalyzes their existence.
In a work setting, the conversation happens exactly the same way – it is, after all, the only way people know how to interact, but the social object tends to have a lot more value. In fact, in days of old, content management systems placed all the value on the content – often not providing any way to allow social interaction or discussion about the important documents, plans and policies that are the artifacts produced by people in work environments. With the dawn of Enterprise 2.0 (the people-centric web for work), we realize that we need to bring more social approaches to the way people work, and to design workflows that mirror the ways people interact with their friends.
Say Messina and Engeström: “We want a web where people are as important to the architecture of the system as documents.”
While I applaud the sentiment, I think it’s more than just a case of bringing people up to the level of documents in terms of importance. They way we manage content has to change in order to allow these conversations to take place. There needs to be more accessibility, more transparency, and clear ownership of content. With the current web, people are clearly indicating to systems architects exactly how they want to work with social objects. We need to take the Content Management tools of old and ensure that they meet these social needs first.
“Ask not what you can do for your Content, but what your Content can do for you”
Aligning Interests
Gordon described our upside-down take on Information Management priorities in his last post. We came to this topsy-turvy perspective after spending years implementing traditional business software and growing increasingly frustrated with recurring configuration, training and deployment issues. Infovark was born out of desire to try something different.
We decided to build Infovark from the ground up to serve the information needs of a typical knowledge worker. We consider the individual first, then the team, on up to the business level.
This led us to all sorts of interesting technical choices. But the hardest decision has had nothing to do with software at all. It’s a business decision, and one we’d been avoiding.
If we really want to put our money where our mouth is, if we really believe in a bottom-up, emergent approach to sharing and collaboration, Infovark needs to be sold differently than other enterprise solutions. After all, the traditional top-down focus on security, compliance, and cost is no accident. It’s a result of catering to the needs of the people that write the checks. If we really want to commit to making valuable, useful software for typical business users, we need to sell it to business users.
