3 posts tagged “it”

    I decided to write a quick prose on interaction design and software. It's simple, but I think it gets the point across.

Since the dawn of time we have learned to progress by
connecting and building off of the world around us. We
have learned how to communicate, explore and create
through example, experimentation and evolution. Yet,
in a world becoming more and more dependent on IT,
we are only beginning to understand the many ways to
interact with the content around us.

This is our journey. Our passion is software. 

                                - Thomas Holloway

    As I said in my previous post, information technology encompasses ideas, concepts, models, and data but most importantly people. IT is the combination of connecting culture, bringing people together, assisting in knowledge distribution. There are few moments in our industry were we come upon groundbreaking technologies. While the pieces of the technology are a culmination of our greatest systems, the model that they present are what literally makes them groundbreaking. What are some of the groundbreaking technologies of our past and present?

• Portable Computer:
  Santa Monica, Ca. named GM Research. The machine which was designed and patented (US Patent No. 4,294,496) by James Murez was first delivered to The Computer Store, Santa Monica, Ca in mid 1977. It was called the Micro Star and later changed the name to The Small One.
• Cellular Phones
  The first commercial cellular network was launched in Japan by NTT in 1979. Fully automatic cellular networks were first introduced in the early to mid 1980s (the 1G generation) with the Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) system in 1981. This was followed by a boom in mobile telephone usage, particularly in Northern Europe.
• The Internet
  

  Although the basic applications and guidelines that make the Internet possible had existed for almost a decade, the network did not gain a public face until the 1990s. On August 6, 1991, CERN, which straddles the border between France and Switzerland, publicized the new World Wide Web project. The Web was invented by English scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989.

  An early popular web browser was ViolaWWW based upon HyperCard. It was eventually replaced in popularity by the Mosaic web browser. In 1993, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois released version 1.0 of Mosaic, and by late 1994 there was growing public interest in the previously academic/technical Internet. By 1996 usage of the word "Internet" had become commonplace, and consequently, so had its misuse as a reference to the World Wide Web.

    While there are literally a multitude of technologies we could include in this list. The three I've listed have changed the way we do business, communicate, even socialize. There are plenty of technologies within each of these categories that provide for decades of progressive innovation. Can you think of anything else that measures up?

    Information Technology (IT) has varying definitions among the community however, it can be best described as a combination of people connected with information. The information varies depending on the industry as well as the strategy to implement. While it may be true that software technologies are common and affordable, even open source, it does not make software any less meaningful. The role of technology in software development is to facilitate an environment for the creation of new systems capable of distributing or processing knowledge/and or models. Given that truth the meaningfulness of the system will always be dependent on the people.

    Often times I hear fellow developers getting excited about brand new technologies, architectures and even wonderful designs and graphics. The IT industry has a sort of hobby of engulfing themselves in there surrounding world. I embrace the fact that fellow developers, designers and engineers put time into discovery and exploration of new or even older systems. However, there are times when the cost-benefit factors outweigh the efforts and work. Project teams, while in their best effort to create and explore, will often take months to even years longer than needed. I propose that project failure is not a result of poor planning, failure to learn what the user needs, multi-task dependency or even the famous death march schedule; project failure, in my opinion, is the result of not realizing a strategy.

    A project typically starts out with planning goals, describing requirements and collecting resources. For the better part of the project, variables are introduced, studied and worked on. The problem is that as the project gets further along, more and more variables are introduced causing a ripple effect of analysis and work distribution. If the project takes too long or simple fails to complete the requirements, most would say that the problem is organization.

    If a football team were to organize a plan in which the ball is passed in a particular sequence between specifically positioned players, their success is dependent on each of those players both being present at the exact location, and remembering exactly when, from whom and to whom the ball is to be passed; moreover that no interruption to the sequence occurs. By comparison, if the team were to simplify this plan to a strategy where the ball is passed in the pattern alone, between any of the team, and at any area on the field, then their vulnerability to variables is greatly reduced, and the opportunity to operate in that manner occurs far more often. This manner is a strategy.

    Put simply, a project team is built because of what and how much they know. But having the best and the brightest does not instantly make you a winner and it certainly doesn't finish a project with the magic of their brains. The same goes for visionaries, a project won't survive on ideas alone even if they are prototyped. As well as much as it is important to focus on interaction design and enabling ease of use with your audience, it doesn't necessarily make a project meaningful, maybe pretty. No, the first step is quite firmly about creating a playbook for each and ever level.

    Here are a few links to help you get on track:

• Digital Strategy
• Personas
• Strategic Management

    The goal is to put more emphasis on the people involved with the information. Whether those people are fictitious personas or real people. The CIO of any company won't be able to manage every project (nor should he/she), so it's important to derive focused variables that can reduce as much vulnerability within the team.