There are two main factors that act as inhibitors as companies work toward the consumerization of the enterprise. Commoditization of IT and Offshoring and Existing Process/structure.

Commoditization of IT and Offshoring

Although the enterprise may be moving toward consumerization, certain factors act as inhibitors as companies attempt to evolve as well. Chief among them is the commoditization of IT and offshoring.

What we hear from analysts and see in our experiences is that corporate IT organizations are not structured in ways that are highly conducive to the idea of being user-centric and consumer-oriented.  Many organizations have embraced the concept that IT is a commodity, and therefore, the focus should be on lowest cost offshore bodies.  There may be a role for offshore development at low cost, but it is not likely to be focused on building the user experience that is going to re-invigorate the business service provider-customer relationship.  It is unrealistic to expect that sending a 100-page MS Word document to the other side of the planet will result in an engaging experience after several months.  Creating a meaningful user experience is a collaborative and iterative process.

Stagnation of IT Procurement

There is an important point on which to set the record straight.  IT procurement organizations remain stuck in the early 2000s, after the dot-com bubble burst, when the market faced a glut of IT resources.  This oversupply resulted in a flight from IT-oriented careers.  The number of IT majors was cut almost in half between 2002 and 2006, from 23,000 to 13,000 in just four years.  As the market demand for IT resources has increased over the past few years the supply has not kept pace.

As evidence of this supply-demand imbalance, the number of H1B Work Visa applicants for IT workers in 2007 was double the quota the first day that applications could be submitted.  From April 2007 until October 2008 there were no H1B Visas available, and this dearth has continued to be the case over the past couple of years as Congress has been unwilling to relax immigration restrictions.  “Exacerbating the situation is the looming retirement of a generation of baby boomers. All this is occurring when the government projects that the IT workforce will grow nearly 25 percent, more than twice as fast as the overall workforce, between 2006 and 2016.” *

*Sources:

http://www.cioinsight.com/article2/0,1540,2248193,00.asp?sp=0&kc=HOTTOPICS012208STR2

http://www.thelibertypapers.org/2007/04/05/us-reaches-h1-b-visa-limit-on-first-day/

http://techcrunch.com/2008/04/21/house-republicans-move-to-increase-h1b-visa-quota/

A Mindset of Quantity over Quality

In addition, there is a phenomenon that is all too prevalent in IT procurement organizations.  The commodity mindset of IT resources has caused procurement to focus on buying IT services as if they were buying toilet paper.  The problem is all IT resources are not the same.  Numerous studies have shown that in a typical development project  most of the work gets done by about 20-30% of the team.  In one project with 30 developers, data collected showed that six developers were doing over 90% of the work on the project.  In addition, only one of those six was doing 40% of the project’s work on her own.  The other 80% of the developers were net distractors slowing down the 20% who were doing the work.* (For more on this topic, see Grady Booche’s Managing The Object Orient Project, p. 189. See also PeopleWare by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister, p. 48).

* John Miano, “The Myth of the Interchangeable Programmer: Can’t We Just Offshore Him?”, Datamation, July 2008

This phenomenon is exacerbated by the fact that when organizations go offshore they think that since labor is low cost and perhaps not the highest quality, they will compensate by hiring more workers to get the job done.   Now, however, a large group requires a good deal of additional management, and the two or three stars probably have their hands full keeping  the rest of the workforce from driving the project into the ground.  Add to that the high turnover with offshore development firms, the language barriers, and the inherent difficulties of working with people on the opposite side of the planet—such as time zones and team building—and this is a model that has its challenges when it comes to creating a compelling user experience.

The offshore model can be a recipe for disaster for organizations trying to collaboratively reinvent the customer experience and engagement model for what could be the most-used channel for interactions.

Insufficient Processes and Structure

Many enterprises don’t have processes or structure built around a user-centric IT delivery approach.  A basic understanding of the user experience and its delivery tends to be the furthest most enterprises have gone, and  many have no capability at all.  This new and evolving area has really grown up significantly in the Web era.  This space has rapidly evolved in the past few years and even a solid Web 1.0 experience design process is not quite adequate anymore.

This young field went through a significant evolution with the advent of rich Internet applications (RIA).  Prior to RIA, it was reasonable to leverage a fairly serial process of creating page schematics (wireframes) and then applying visual design to them; then the project would be handed off to an HTML resource, who would then bring it to life and provide this light front end to the J2EE or .Net development team.  With RIA, this serial approach is antiquated and significantly less effective.   As interactions become more cinematic, the motion of page elements communicates information and guides the user to the next action.  These interactions blur the line between the role of an information architect—who lays out the page and page flow—with the visual designer—who, instead of just coloring the page, is now integrally involved with leveraging the creative page elements to communicate action and flow (see Figure 6).

Figure 6: Integration Leads to Greater Effectiveness, Efficiency

As RIA technologies continue to mature and evolve, there is a powerful give and take between the technologist and the design team. The technologies don’t just bound the design by what is technically feasible, but also push the design further by introducing capabilities that the design team never dreamed possible.   This process has been reinforced by the emergence of Agile Design and Development methodologies.  It is not necessary to fully embrace the Agile nirvana to gain the benefits of key Agile ideas, such as multiple spirals throughout a development cycle. In such an instance, incremental capabilities emerge early in the process, providing business users an opportunity to interact with the solution and provide feedback along the way.

New Emphasis on Conceptual Design

A key shift has been the importance of conceptual designs to communicate the direction early in a project’s life cycle.  These concepts help to crystallize business intent, provide something tangible to test with users, and as importantly, can be utilized to help secure buy-in and project funding.  These are frequently manifested in a Flash prototype but can also exist in a series of design comps and accompanying documentation.

Many organizations lack an understanding of the new design and development processes necessary to producing rich and engaging experiences. They also lack the specialized skill sets and resources to deliver on these methodologies.   We have seen the emergence of whole new roles that did not previously exist, but are keys to project success, such as the Flex Styler.  This is a role similar to an HTML/CSS resource but requires additional skills with graphics modifications, animation and Action Script (the language of Flash/Flex).   These resources are key to bridging the gap between a user experience design and the object-oriented development team that makes an enterprise application come to life (see Figure 7).

Figure 7: New Skills Bridge the Gap

In the next post I will explore the future of the enterprise.

Consumerization of the Enterprise Part 1:  A Call To Action

Microsoft’s decision to forgo backward compatibility with Windows Mobile was somewhat controversial, but going with Silverlight for application development in Windows Phone 7 was the right call. In doing so, Microsoft is empowering developers with .NET experience to hit the ground running and start building apps for Windows Phone 7.

“Microsoft might be onto something with their use of Microsoft Silverlight as the standard way to develop applications for Windows Phone 7 devices,” said Dave Meeker, director of emerging technology at Roundarch, a user experience and technology design firm that works primarily with the Fortune 500 and large government organizations.

Read the full article at CRN.com.

About Dave Meeker
Dave Meeker has been professionally involved in the strategy, design and development of next generation creative technology since 1993 and currently serves as the Director of Emerging Technology for Roundarch as well as Co-Director of Roundarch Labs.

Prior to his role at Roundarch, Dave was Managing Partner at EffectiveUI, Director of Custom Applications at Whittmanhart, and Director of Information Architecture at Chicago’s dotCom darling, Web Design Group. Dave got his start in 1994, offering dial-up Internet access and Web design services as part of an early Internet start-up ISP and consulting firm that eventually evolved into, NewReach Communications, a national provider of Internet access, consulting and design services through several acquisitions, including a company in S. Florida company called Maverick Digital, where Dave served as the director of interactive production.

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If I could sum up 360|Flex 2010 in one word it would have to be…Inspirational. Even with all of talk of HTML 5 and flash on mobile devices looming in the air, the future of Flex and the Flash Platform looks very exciting.

There were many great sessions and the hardest thing about being there was choosing which ones to attend and which ones I would have to miss!

Day 1 – Keynote

The conference started off with a split keynote, first by Christian Cantrell of the Adobe Air team and then Doug McCune followed with an uplifting and inspirational talk.

Christian outlined some details about Adobe’s next set of technologies. He mainly talked about the next version of Adobe AIR, code named Zephyr. Like many of Adobe’s set of new technologies to hit the ground running soon (Hero, the next Flex SDK, and Burrito, the next Flash Builder), Zephyr focuses on bringing better support to mobile. Zephyr will include multi-touch for mobile, orientation, acceleration data, camera and camera UI APIs, geo-location, plus much more.

When Christian was finished going over the exciting new offerings from Adobe, it was time for Doug McCune. Before Doug came on Nate beck and RJ Owen added an episode to the long running prank war between them and Doug. This prank was based on a post that appeared on InsideRIA on April Fool’s day. The prank claimed that Doug had passed away due to a number of Flex related accidents. RJ and Nate then delivered a short eulogy before showing  video reactions to Doug’s death from prominent members of the Flex community.

Doug, who is definitely not dead, took the stage and began his talk on the value of going off on tangents. He spoke about the value of following distractions and letting them evolve into interesting experiments. His main point was how this approach can keep you sane, enhance your knowledge, and ultimately make you a better developer, even though these tangents may often have little or nothing to do with your billable work.

Doug started by saying he was getting into the refrigerator magnet business. Then began to elaborate and speak about some of the tangents he’s been following recently. Starting with 8-bit maps of cities, reminiscent of the original SimCity, and ending with having some of his 3d crime map visualizations produced as refrigerator magnets. Doug spoke about various different tangential experiments that ultimately ended with the production of these magnets. Each tangent was a conscious decision to spend time on doing something interesting to him rather than something billable. Doug spoke about the value, and necessity even, of doing these types of things to keep programming fun. He then encouraged the audience to take time out of their career to support their passions, which Doug pointed out… “will help us kick ass!”.

After the keynote, I was lucky enough to speak with Doug for a moment about his inspiration for the magnets. He told me that the inspiration came from Inuit Eskimos who used to carve maps onto a small piece of bark. The carvings would allow them to navigate rivers and streams at night by simply feeling the map and being able to recognize landmarks by the raised and relief carvings. This gave Doug the inspiration to do something different and a bit more physical with the great digital 3d mapping that he has been doing.

Day 1 – Sessions

On the first day of the conference I saw Paul Taylor speak about his tiny TLF framework for advanced text rendering and watched Jesse Freeman, technical architect at Roundarch, and Jesse Warden debate Flex vs. Actionscript.

Paul Taylor – Tiny TLF

Paul Taylor started the conference with a bang talking about his new Tiny TLF framework. TinyTLF is a framework for advanced rendering of text and is built on top of the Flash Text Engine (FTE). It was developed as an alternative to the flex TLF framework as has a bunch of awesome features.

As Paul explained, TinyTLF is built on some basic core principles. Most importantly, composition over inheritance and proper encapsulation to create a framework that allows additional features to be mapped in later. TinyTLF provides a very modularized and component style approach to text rendering. At the core of the project is a 39k text engine. Paul has also built a styling framework, layout library, decoration library, and a gesture and behaviors library. These pieces can all be used independently, and you can also add or map in your own extensions to any piece of the platform.

One of the best things about TinyTLF is the full support for CSS and HTML. Anyone who has ever worked with Flex 3’s htmlText will understand what I’m saying right away. Flex’s TLF CSS and HTML support is unpredictable at best and does not support true CSS the way traditional web developers would expect. TinyTLF addresses this by providing a better CSS and HTML implementation with a very small amount of overhead.

The final size of the entire core library once compiled into your swf is only 40k. In my opinion, it is one of the best open source frameworks have seen. If you do anything with text, check it out.

Jess Freeman vs. Jesse Warden: Actionscript vs. Flex

Not too long ago Jesse Freeman and Jesse Warden started an argument about whether pure Actionscript development is better than Flex development, with Freeman supporting Actionscript and Warden defending Flex. The formal debate had Chuck Freedman moderating and was very entertaining and informative. A question was posed and the defender had 2 minutes to respond to the question, followed by a one minute attack by the other Jesse, followed by a 1 minute rebuttal. Judges voted on the answers individually and a winner was chosen at the end.

Both Jesse’s had great points and rebuttals but in the end Jesse Warden won. Jesse Freeman’s main point seemed to be that even as a Flex Developer, pure Actionscript is essential for developers to understand and is lighter weight than using the bloated Flex Framework. Jesse Warden’s main point, in my opinion, was that Flex development allowed you to get working applications done faster, which is potentially more important to many modern enterprise client needs.

I believe both of these points are true and valid. A Flex developer interested in becoming an expert is going to have to know Actionscript at a deep level, and Flex developers with a background in Flash tend to be more comfortable with Flex.

Day 2 – Sessions

Leonard Souza: States and Transitions

Leonard Souza gave a great explanation of doing states and transitions well and then a thorough description of how to implement these ideas in Flex.

Leonard started with slides on the anatomy of good transitions. The most important concept he spoke of was focusing on the context of the transition. He encouraged everyone to use transitions wisely, saying “…Abuse of transitions or animation for its own sake is one of the primary reasons that Flash has earned a bad reputation with certain folks on the web”. He then gave examples and descriptions of the fundamental elements of animation, easing, stretching, and so on. He talked about how each of these can be used to reinforce a different context and gave great examples of where each is appropriate.

Check out Leonard’s blog soon for the source code of his example presentation and a more in depth description of the project.

Dan Florio-SWFAddress and Google Analytics for Flex.

Dan Florio, creator of RunPee.com, gave a very informative talk about using SWFAddress and Google Analytics to create some interesting scenarios where developers will be able to get useful statistics from user interactions and system events.

Side Note: RunPee.com is a hilarious website/phone app that allows you to check (and post) the most boring times of a movie. This allows users to research the times so that they can relieve themselves during the movie without missing important parts of the plot. The project makes extensive use of SWFAddress and Google analytics to provide some very valuable information.

Dan’s talk centered on breaking away from the traditional paradigm of tracking links and indexing. Since Flex is essentially state and event driven, this traditional methodology cannot be applied to Flex applications very easily. SWFAddress allows developers to approach deep linking in a new way and opens up some unique possibilities. Imagine you want to fire off an event to Google when a user stops watching a video. How about sending a friend a link to a particular application state? Sound awesome? It is, and it’s all possible with SWFAddress.

Day 3 – Sessions

Huyen Tue Dao: Typography – Text Editing in the Text Layout Framework

Coming from a design background and being a bit of a typography nerd, I really appreciated this presentation. Huyen did a great session on the new capabilities, and some lacking capabilities, of the new Flash Text Engine (FTE) and the new Text Layout Framework (TLF).

The presentation was very fast as there was a lot to cover in only 70 minutes. One of the key points I took out of this presentation was the ease with which developers can expand upon the new Text Layout Framework (as seen demonstrated by Paul Taylor with his tinyTLF framework).

She also used the New York Times Reader application, powered by Air 2.0, as a backdrop and source for examples and inspiration. It’s really amazing to see some of the powerful things that the TLF can do right out of the box. She showed great examples of multi-column text flows, text that can flow across multiple components, dynamic resizing of text… plus much more.

Huyen Tue Dao promises to update her blog soon with the complete presentation as well as source code for the many great examples that she presented. If you’re a typography nerd, or just interested in learning more about FTE and TLF I would suggest to follow Huyen as she is blazing the rich text trail.

Wrap Up

My brain was bit of mush after attending due to amount of knowledge it soaked in! I was also able to network and chat with some of the best developers and engineers in the industry. The organizers were very nice and hospitable, offering free snacks and all kinds of fun games to participate in. Informal debates, impromptu code groups, great advice and insight, it was everything I hoped for and more! All in all, it was an inspirational and very informative event. If you have a chance to attend a 360|Flex conference I would highly recommend it. You won’t find yourself saying… “I went to this Flex conference and all I got was this stupid Adobe shirt” … although you probably will still get at least one t-shirt.

The only regret I have is not being able to attend all of the sessions. Notably the “Flex Development: The Next Generation” session  by Adam Flater, technical architect and evangelist at Roundarch.  Luckily the organizers are posting all of them online shortly.

Session videos and more information can be found at: http://www.360conferences.com/conference-videos

Eric Fisher, staff writer for Sports Business Journal, features Roundarch as a company that is developing products and services poised to become more prominent within the sports industry.

Roundarch

This 10-year-old, Chicago-based digital agency has carved out a growing business aiding a range of media firms and consumer brands such as Avis, HBO, the London Underground and Hershey’s. But two recent, high-profile deals are enlarging the company’s profile in sports. Roundarch has partnered with the New York Jets to create an online dashboard for team executives that monitors in real time key stadium functions such as parking, ticketing, and concession and merchandise sales. The immediate, easy-to-scan, touchscreen dashboard allows team officials to make swift operational changes on game day. The Jets are the first NFL team to test the product. “A lot of our clients in finance and investments are looking into this,” said Dave Vanslette, Roundarch vice president. “Sports is not only a growth area for us unto itself, but back into other areas, too.” Roundarch, meanwhile, has partnered with Bloomberg Sports to help create Bloomberg’s new Decision Maker iPad application for fantasy football.

Read the whole article here.

StrataLogica has been selected as a finalist for a Chicago Innovation Award and we would love your support for the People’s Choice award.  StrataLogica is a digital education product built upon Google Earth that Roundarch designed and built for our client Nystrom/Herff Jones.

Vote here.

What if your mobile device could listen to the world around you and activate actions based on your preferences?  The actions could initiate a number of capabilities on your mobile device from displaying a map to executing a purchase transaction.  If you own a smart phone, you are one of 45.5 million mobile consumers that have devices with the capability of processing sound signals.  The device simply listens through the microphone, captures a sound signal then translates the signal into a digital signature which is used to lookup a corresponding command for that signature.   This capability is perhaps one of the most seamless ways to interact with the digital world- no wires, no configurations, no typing… just listening.   The opportunities are very exciting.  As you work through the rushing ideas, you will begin to realize that many possibilities have been addressed by other means… but not all.  Let’s explore some of the benefits and practical applications for this particular concept.

At this stage in our human-computer evolution, due to the mobility of computers, most of us may excuse ourselves from a social setting to interact with our devices in the middle of an otherwise social event.  Some are even less well-mannered than that.  I recall going to an Interactive SXSW conference the year after Twitter made its social media debut.  What struck me most about that conference was how ironically anti-social some of the etiquette was.  Online, real-time socializing seemed to be where the excitement was.  Sure, most people were very friendly, but they were also frequently buried in their mobile devices attempting to stay connected.  There has to be a better way to use your device more seamlessly in a social setting.  For starters, imagine if you are at a conference like that and you didn’t have to type anything into your mobile device to register for a Twitter feed of a favorite presenter.  Or, imagine sharing your contact information during a meeting with a new team, without Bluetooth configuration, using sound commands between devices- passively, as a matter of habit.  You just saved a bunch of time without disrupting the social interaction.

While there are many potential applications for mobile devices, including tablet pcs, the sound command paradigm may be best leveraged by a sort of broadcast scenario.  A situation where you have a captive and targeted audience that may want to know more about what you are broadcasting.   When you use this formula, the possibilities become a little more focused without straying into the paradigms already addressed by QR codes, SMS text messaging and Bluetooth capabilities.  Here are some thoughts:

• Radio – Synch the listener to related information of the broadcast, supplementing the experience with visuals.

• Auctions – Synch the audience to additional details of a product on display.

• Public Service Language Translation – Metro trains could broadcast sound signals that will render transit and location information on your device in your chosen language.

There are some really exciting opportunities to explore.   While sound will not address all of our computer interaction deficiencies, it is a big step in that direction.  Over time, I’m sure these capabilities will become much more robust and wide-spread.  We’ve got a lot to look forward to.

Read the full white paper here.