CIOs have a tough problem to solve.  It is typically their responsibility to maintain all of the applications within their network, safely and securely.  This means CIOs have to say ‘no’ a lot.  Lately, however, CIOs have been using a secret weapon that can help them reduce risks, bounce back from downtime and manage several times more computer resources at once.  In essence, they are able to say ‘yes’ much more frequently.  This is a dream state for both businesses and consumers and it is enabled by a technology known as virtualization.

Virtualization decouples the operating system from the underlying machine, allowing you to spin-up any operating system on demand.  This makes competing operating systems more accessible than ever.  This capability fueled the growth of infrastructure as a service which revolutionized IT resource management.  This really is the foundation of cloud computing, which marked the beginning of the end for some software compatibility issues since many productivity applications that used to be [enter favorite OS here]-based are now appearing free, online and delivered through the browser.  Further, the ability to spin-up Windows from Mac made it easier for a consumer to decide to purchase a Mac without giving up desktop software that needed to run on Windows.  Consumers were liberated from vendor lock-in and had more choices.  Virtualization was therefore a big win for consumers but has made it much more competitive for desktop operating systems that can no longer monopolize your overall experience.

With the relevance of the desktop OS eroding, many platform strategies started looking to the cloud and mobile to capture the shift in demand.  The two forces combine to create a full spectrum of offerings beyond the benefits of a single device, which include specialized marketplaces, cloud storage, music synch, home entertainment device interop, lifestyle accessories etc…  This is where virtualization becomes an intriguing wildcard.

Enter BlueStacks.  BlueStacks uses an embedded virtualization approach that lets you run native Android applications within Windows.  This capability merges two very large user groups and merges the benefits on both platforms.  You can use BlueStacks on your Windows 7 computer to spare your mobile phone’s battery, save on mobile network data charges, or generally free yourself from device dependency.  Maybe you want to configure your Android applications with a proper keyboard, like adding routes to a transit tracker or typing a shopping list into Springpad to synch to your mobile device.   Maybe you need the Google Authenticator app to login to Google Docs on your laptop and you don’t have your mobile device handy.  Or maybe your phone’s battery is dead.  As the platform arms race heats up, this dual approach is compelling.  Why lock into one platform when you can consolidate two?

Windows 7 desktop view. My selected Android applications loaded into BlueStacks

Windows 7 desktop view. BlueStacks running the Android Chicago Transit Tracker

Going forward, the next logical step would be enabling the mobile device itself to swap between platforms. The iDroid project has demonstrated it can run Android on a jailbroken iPhone – in dual boot mode.   Microsoft’s approach in their ambitious Windows 8 vision is more usable by switching between desktop and tablet mode, albeit both running proprietary instances of windows.  Imagine that you would no longer need a specific device to get access to a specific application.  You could port your own user experience with any device you have adapted to any interface you encounter.  You just switch between virtual machine instances (VMs) on your device as needed.  Imagine never having to configure an application again – the VM will have restricted OS access so you can pre-load all the settings required.  Even still, you may ask why someone would really need to dynamically switch platforms (switching two instances of Android or switching Android with iOS).  It’s not so much that you, the consumer, really needs it as much as you, the corporate citizen does.

Consider this – you work for a small company that is paranoid about security and won’t allow iPads because malware was once introduced to the internal network from being used by carefree kids at home.  With virtualization on mobile devices, you can now purchase almost any device you want, but while at work, you get a pre-loaded virtualized, secured instance that allows IT to manage the safety of the devices on their network.  Further, the VM can be preloaded with all of the productivity tools you are standardized on (e.g. Exchange email/contacts, Dropbox, Yammer, Salesforce etc…).  Your iPad can now be used safely at home by the kids as designed, but your work assets are encrypted and physically inaccessible.  This is exactly the type of abstraction that can help thwart network intrusions, whether introduced from downloads or usb-connected devices.

iDroid project’s dual boot screen on a jail broken iPhone 3G

Legal issues will likely prevent virtualization from becoming ubiquitous across mobile devices in these early days.  After all, Mac OS X is not legally permitted to run inside of a virtualized instance on non-Mac computers (although you can run Windows from a Mac if you have a Windows license).  As our mobile lifestyles evolve, the context of our problems will change.  Within a single household, consumers will want platform independence and a consolidated way to manage all of their devices much like the CIOs of an enterprise today.  So while some applications of virtualization may not be endorsed, virtualization is proven and is mostly limited by licensing with proprietary platforms.

Over the last several years, our teams at Roundarch have had many unique opportunities to devise and execute truly innovative solutions for clients.  Many of the companies that we work with seek out our services when they feel they need to break new ground or create a positive disruption and sometimes even defy the status quo.

When our clients find success, the formula most often begins with an exceptionally well-crafted strategy supported by Roundarch’s ability to deliver on user experience; visual and technical solutions that ultimately help set them apart from their competition or solve their business problems.

This formula for success is illustrated in the work we’ve done for clients including: The New York Jets, HBO, Bloomberg Sports, Avis, Alinea and others. We have also recently had the good fortune to be recognized for our efforts by an industry leading organization. Last week, I was notified that Roundarch would be honored as a 2011 Laureate in Innovation, an award given by the Computerworld Honors Program.  For more than two decades, the Computerworld Honors Program has recognized individuals and organizations that create and use information technology to promote and advance public welfare, contribute to the greater good of society and change the world for the better.

Roundarch will receive this award in recognition of an initiative that is several years in the making and is a product of the Roundarch “Labs” program that I have the responsibility of managing.

The technology at hand has been at the center of several of our most innovative customer solutions and offers many opportunities to enable forward-thinking user experiences across the many channels of digital content/devices that have (and continue to) emerge.  The technology, better known as Device Connectivity Framework or DCF is a proprietary technology developed by Roundarch.

Our DCF technology seeks to enable cross-device / cross-language /cross-OS and cross-network interactivity between software applications, providing a starting point for our developers to create applications on any platform that can easily interact with applications on any other platform, taking much of the heavy lifting out of the device-to-device communication.

The Computerworld Honors Program specifically recognized our use of DCF technology in a situation where we utilize it as the enabling technology for software that we also developed for use within the mobile phone industry – by carriers and device manufacturers.

It’s an honor to be recognized as a 2011 Laureate, taking a spot next to other well-known organizations such as IBM, Microsoft, Cisco Systems and Siemens who were also named as Honors Laureates this year.

I’d like to congratulate everyone at Roundarch, especially those who have contributed to the success of our DCF technology. I’d also like to thank those who’ve been willing to place trust in the processes related to innovation and the incubation of emerging concepts and technologies.

Here’s to the future.

Roundarch developer Pek Pongpaet will be speaking at SPARKt, an innovation and technology conference focused on real estate that will be held February 26, 2010 at The Playground Theater (3209 N. Halsted) in Chicago. Pek will be sharing his experience and passion for tech startups, technology, and martial arts. He’ll be touching on topics like microblogging, innovation, mobile and augmented reality, and more. StrataLogica, created by Roundarch with Nystrom, will be featured as an example of bringing business and technology innovation to the client.

For tickets and more information visit http://sparkt.org/

Left to right: John Peebles of Avis Budget Group, Aman Datta of Roundarch, Ray Picard, Jeff Westover and Ben Kiker of Interwoven.

Aman Data, Vice President of Roundarch, and John Peebles, Vice President Online Marketing at Avis Budget Group, presented Roundarch‘s upcoming redesign of AVIS.com to a group of industry and financial analysts at Interwoven‘s analyst day today in New York.  Avis and Roundarch discussed the Q1 upcoming relaunch of AVIS.com as well as several innovative changes that are being advanced in the market today.  One of the key innovations is the development of an “extra” site experience.  Customers can now perform a full reservation process in a single rich widget.  This widget is currently featured on www.rentacar.com and will be used on many Avis partner sites in the future.  The widget, developed in Adobe Flex, is one of many innovations that Roundarch and Avis are bringing to the travel market.

In our crusade for the grail of design innovation, nature’s 4.6 billion years of (re) evolutionary design supplies us with the perfect template.

Design innovation isn’t just about having the “big idea” (more about that and the role of research in my next post) – it’s a process, a funnel that produces success equal only to the cumulative failure required to achieve it. Not clear on that? Let mother earth and arguably the most successful innovation of all time, you and me, bring it into focus. You’ll notice there seem to be rules, patterns actually, to producing innovation, and massively successful designs (like homo sapiens and the ubiquitous iPod) have harnessed that power.

Looking at the geological time line starting with the Hadeon Eon (when earth’s crust took form) to the modern day, cycles of creation exemplified by the Cambrian and Permian eras have ushered new life forms into existence only to be followed by periods of mass extinction that have wiped most of them from the face of the planet. Nature has provided us with a compelling template for distilling successful design practices that produce innovation – a powerful suggestion of patterns that make up what we can call the universes’ law of design. It reveals a design funnel and a set of basic guidelines that innovative organizations, like Apple, have embraced as their own.

Bill Buxton’s “Sketching User Experiences” provided a first look at a design funnel. The design funnel that overlays earth’s geological timeline and the creation of man, is essentially an extension of this and surfaces key insights into repeatable innovation design:
1.    Innovation is the product of a refinement funnel – And that funnel starts wide and long, with and explosion of options that flow through cycles of reduction ultimately producing a single point of desirability and viability – the design solution. In a presentation at SXSW, Apple’s chief engineer Michael Lopp, explained how design flows through this funnel (that maps to Apple’s 10 to 3 to 1 design approach). As intense as it my seem, every Apple system feature is born in a set of 10 different detailed designs, all of which are genuinely valid options – not just those mock alternatives design firms typically push out to clients as a smoke screen to show “a lot of work and hard thinking”.
2.    Each cycle is marked by detailed design – This may shock a community that is fully bought into a notion of high level or “conceptual design” where low fidelity sketches/wireframes are the prevailing means of vetting the desired direction. I’m not suggesting here that we get rid of them, only that detailed design is an essential ingredient of the conceptual stage. Very much the same way thousands of actual living organisms, and not just sketches of potential organisms, were needed to make effective evolutionary decisions.
3.    Invest time up front – The era of modern man is only a spec on the grand scale of creation. Nature has clearly spent much more time and resources on the initial stages of design choosing to privileged detail and diversity over efficiency. This is clearly a tension for traditional design work. More often than not we find ourselves rushing through low fidelity conceptual designs to hone in on that one solution we push through to detailed design. Nature’s advice? Always give yourself more time for conceptual design and make sure you get the right amount of detail to support reductive decisions.
4.    The coin for innovation is failure (read: learning) – The same way that explosion of life on earth was followed by extinction (by the end of the Permian era over 50% of all land creatures and 95% of all sea creatures had been wiped out), innovative design is also marked by creative spurts and a selection process that pushes aside the undesirable and unviable. Successful shortcuts are as rare as they are likely to succeed. That means you need to bank on going through the motions – if failing is not an option then you can’t be serious about innovating.
5.    Innovation is expensive – Running the numbers on the resources required to generate thousands of life forms, most of which ultimately discarded by evolution, will show that true innovation has a price tag. The funnel can be long and mistakes need to be made. There is no way to sugar coat it, the bottom line is that real innovation requires resources and commitment. If it’s any solace though, the silver lining is the upside for return on innovative designs is tremendous.

Most user experience professionals learn early on that user centered design (UCD), or some variation thereof, is the go-to approach in the effort to generate usable, useful and joyful designs. I obviously don’t challenge the importance of the user and the need to make sure they are represented through out the design process (although I do admit an over zealous obsession with the end user has the potential to produce myopic design).

But we should consider evolving that approach to one that assumes user representation as a given, and more importantly, borrows from earth’s evolutionary heritage to articulate the design dynamics for achieving repeatable innovation. Call it Innovation Centered Design (ICD) – driving success for both you and your customers.