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.
