Posts Tagged ‘Design’

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Information Design as a Baseline for Business IT Innovation

Monday, November 16th, 2009

Information design is critical for business IT innovation. Good information design is what enables information technology to best display information, best help users to understand the information, and best encourages users to make the desired response with the information. Without good information design, any IT innovation effort is doomed to failure. Good information design provides a solid baseline for IT to create innovative, superior solutions for businesses. See below for the definition of information design, what is involved in information design, and how to measure the effectiveness of information design for businesses.

Information Design Definition. Information design is the art and science of preparing information so that it can be used by human beings with efficiency and effectiveness.

The Three Levels of Information Design. Saul Carliner’ article, Physical, Cognitive, and Affective: A Three-Part Framework for Information Design describes a good framework for information design. See below for a summary of the three levels of information design.

  • The Physical Level of Information Design. The physical level of information design is where information technology enables the user to find information. This level includes things like page design, graphics, and various other types of media.
  • The Cognitive Level of Information Design. The cognitive level of information design is where IT enables the user to understand the information. This includes things like usability, tailoring information to the situation, and having the right information available at the right time.
  • The Affective (emotional) Level of Information Design. The affective level of information design is where IT enables the user to feel comfortable with the presentation of the information. This includes things like using media to get and retain the user’s attention, providing information that gains the user’s trust, and providing information in a format that encourage the user to have the desired response.

Information design is more than just a method to display information at the physical level. Information design is a framework for processing data to achieve a superior information-based solution that enables better user decision-making and better business operations.

Design Patterns. There are many design patterns that can be re-used as part of an IT business solution. These design patterns offer a proven baseline for creating innovative IT solutions. Information design patterns include software design patterns where proven software modules and algorithms can be re-used. There are also proven information design patterns when it comes to displaying information. Many of these you see everyday like the chart types that you can find in the MS Powerpoint application. See Information Design Patterns for common information design types.

Measuring How Information Design Adds Value to a Business. It can be difficult to determine how effective an information design solution is at adding value to a business. As with any business solution, it is best to measure information design in terms of things like efficiency, productivity, quality, competitive positioning, market share, financial measure, etc. See posting on Measuring How System Design Adds Value to a Business for more information.


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Measuring How System Design Adds Value to a Business

Sunday, November 8th, 2009

With information technology, it is sometimes difficult to determine how much a system’s design contributes to the success of a business. From my experience a system’s design contributes as much as 50% or more to the success of an IT project. If you can get the system design right, system implementation is usually easier, it is less likely to have cost overruns, and it assures that the needs of the business are met. Key to good system design is having firm requirements, and then identifying the right design that meets the requirements.



Businessweek has a good article, Ten Ways to Measure Design’s Success, on how to measure the effectiveness of design in terms of business success. These measures are also good guidelines in terms of measuring the effectiveness of the design of an information system. See below on methods that can be used to measure how good a system is designed.


10 Measures of Good Information System Design

1. Purchase Influence. Measure a system’s design in terms of Return on Investment (ROI). If you role out a new system or re-design the system, measure the increase revenue less the cost of the system. This would be appropriate for a new software product in a software company or a customer-facing system in a service company.

2. New Markets. Measure a system’s design on how well it enabled a business to enter a new market or gain market share. This could be a new prepackage product or a system that contributes to providing a new service for a company.

3. Brand Image and Corporate Reputation. Measure a system’s design in terms of how it increases brand image and reputation. The design of corporate web sites are good candidates to measure by brand performance. Good examples of web sites are Yahoo!, Google, and Bing. Which web site design is increasing brand image and corporate reputation?

4. Time to Market. Measure a system’s design in terms of how fast new or enhanced product and services can be brought to market. Does it take you a year to do a major software upgrade in order to roll out a new product or service? Or is your system agile where it can adapt and change in order for the business to take advantage of business opportunities faster than the competition?

5. Cost Savings. How is your business doing in regard to such traditional financial ratios such as return on assets and net cash flow to sales? With so many business processes automated, a business’ financial performance is more and more directly affected by how well their systems are designed.

6. Enable Product and Service Innovation. How is your system’s design enabling product and service innovation? As more and more business processes are automated, the design of your systems either enable or inhibit innovation. Are your systems’ designs solving last year’s business problems or are they focused on the future?

7. Develop Communities of Customers. For customer-facing systems, measure how effective a system’s design strengthens and increases the number of customers using the system’s services. Good examples of type systems that can be measured in terms of developing communities of customers is Facebook and Twitter.

8. Create Intellectual Property. Measure a system’s design effectiveness by considering how much a business would lose if the system’s design was stolen or reversed engineered by a competitor.

9. Improve usability. Measure a system’s design by its usability. For web sites, most companies use some type of analytics to measure how users navigate a web site. A key design measurement would be how effective is the web site at leading the web site visitor from the landing page to the desired response (fill out a lead form, buy a product, and so on).

10. Improve Sustainability. Measure how well a system’s design uses and conserves resources. This can be from a “green” perspective as well as how efficient the system is at doing its job. Does it need a lot of downtime for maintenance? Does it use a lot of resources (labor, money, etc) to operate?

As we continue to automate more and more business processes, system design becomes more and more critical to businesses. With this criticality, it becomes increasingly important that we measure the effectiveness of a system’s design to meet current and future needs of the business.


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Birth of Internet – Economics or Nuclear Protection?

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

Slanted View of Internet History. It is so easy to get a slanted view of history. A question came up about how the internet got started. My immediate thought was that it came into existence as a counter-measure to assure military communications in the event of a nuclear attack. My involvement in the internet started in the mid-80s when there were just thousands on the internet, not hundreds of millions. My first internet project was funded by DARPA and the U.S. Army. We were testing the ability for military fighting vehicle simulators to interact over the internet between the United States and Europe. I would think that I would have a correct view of the history of the internet with my early involvement in the internet and the military.

ArpaNet

Birth of Internet – Economics or Nuclear Protection?

Urban Legend of Internet Origins Dispelled. Well, I am wrong and have perpetuated an urban legend. Yes, the internet was partially funded by the Department of Defense, but the internet’s real roots are more based on economic reasons. An article by Johna Till Johnson called, Net was born of economic necessity, not fear, brings me back to reality that it was simple economics that really made the internet what it is today. The article tells us that it was economics that drove the the design and creation of the internet as we know it today. Johnson tells us:

“But the actual architecture and creation of the ‘Net was handled … by a team of researchers headed by Larry Roberts. Their goal was more modest: to effectively share computing resources among multiple organizations (including universities and government contractors). Roberts & Co. considered, but ultimately rejected, a centralized design for traffic management – not out of resilience concerns, but because nobody was willing to dedicate scarce and expensive computing resources to the problem of centrally managing and controlling traffic. Computer owners were, however, willing to spare a small fraction of their computational resources to route traffic in a distributed fashion – so Roberts opted to go with a Baran-like distributed design.”

The Economics of the Internet. She is right. We had this new internet technology to allow computers to share data over vast geographic distances. Large computer mainframes could act as hosts to inter-connect all these computers, but no one wanted to foot the bill for the mainframe. Thus, the internet was born where everyone dedicated a “small fraction of their computational resources to route traffic in a distributed fashion.” I still think that there is some truth to the fact that the internet was partially funded to assure military communications in the event of nuclear war, but the real driver of the internet was, and is economics.

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