Joe Lamantia.com

I’ve just started a new ‘Orga­ni­za­tional Archi­tec­ture’ group on Slideshare, to explore links to user expe­ri­ence, and ques­tions like these:

• What is orga­ni­za­tional architecture?
• How does orga­ni­za­tional archi­tec­ture relate to user experience?
• What can user expe­ri­ence prac­ti­tion­ers bor­row from OA to become more effective?

Join now!

Col­lab­o­ra­tion is the lat­est ral­ly­ing cry of soft­ware ven­dors hop­ing to embed new gen­er­a­tions of enter­prise class tools and user expe­ri­ences into the fab­ric of the mod­ern work­place. Microsoft, IBM, and other firms expect that con­trol or lead­er­ship in the mar­ket for col­lab­o­ra­tion, whether by own­ing the archi­tec­ture, sys­tems, or other solu­tion com­po­nents, will be lucra­tive. A recent Rad­i­cati Group study (qual­ity uncon­firmed…) of the mar­ket size for enter­prise col­lab­o­ra­tion offered an esti­mate of $1.6 bil­lion now, grow­ing 10% annu­ally to $2.3 bil­lion in 2010.
Beyond the sub­stan­tial money to be made cre­at­ing, sell­ing, installing, and ser­vic­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion solu­tions lies the strate­gic advan­tage of mar­ket def­i­n­i­tion. The vendor(s) that own(s) the col­lab­o­ra­tion space expect(s) to become an inte­gral to the knowl­edge economy’s sup­port­ing envi­ron­ment in the same way that Ford and Gen­eral Motors became essen­tial to the sub­ur­ban­ized con­sumer archi­tec­tures of the post WWII era by serv­ing simul­ta­ne­ously as employ­ers, man­u­fac­tur­ers, cul­tural mar­keters, cap­i­tal reser­voirs, and auto­mo­bile sell­ers. Col­lab­o­ra­tion ven­dors know that achiev­ing any level of indis­pen­si­bil­ity will enhance their longevity by mak­ing them a neces­sity within the knowl­edge econ­omy.
It’s worth tak­ing a moment to call atten­tion to the impli­ca­tions: by defin­ing the user expe­ri­ences and tech­no­log­i­cal build­ing blocks brought together to real­ize col­lab­o­ra­tion in large enter­prises, these ven­dors will directly shape our basic con­cepts and under­stand­ing (our men­tal mod­els and cog­ni­tive frames) of col­lab­o­ra­tion. Once embed­ded, these archi­tec­tures, sys­tems, and busi­ness processes, and the social struc­tures and con­cep­tual mod­els cre­ated in response, will in large part define the (infor­ma­tion) work­ing envi­ron­ments of the future.
And yes, this is exactly what these ven­dors aspire to achieve; the Microsoft Share­point Prod­ucts and Tech­nolo­gies Devel­op­ment Team blog, offers:
“Share­Point Prod­ucts and Tech­nolo­gies have become a key part of our strat­egy for deliv­er­ing a com­plete work­ing envi­ron­ment for infor­ma­tion work­ers, where they can col­lab­o­rate together, share infor­ma­tion with oth­ers, and find infor­ma­tion and peo­ple that can help them solve their busi­ness prob­lems.“
[From SHAREPOINT’S ROLE IN MICROSOFT’S COLLABORATION STRATEGY.]
And IBM’s mar­ket­ing is not pitched and deliv­ered in a man­ner as sweep­ing, but the impli­ca­tions are sim­i­lar, as in the overview IBM® Work­place™: Sim­ply a bet­ter way]:
“IBM Work­place™ Solu­tions are role-based frame­works to help cus­tomers apply IBM Work­place tech­nolo­gies faster and more pro­duc­tively… These solu­tions are designed to pro­vide ‘short-cuts’ for cre­at­ing a high per­for­mance role-based work envi­ron­ment, help­ing to accel­er­ate time-to-value.“
The Mod­els for com­mu­ni­ca­tion and rela­tion­ships built into our tools are very pow­er­ful, and often employed in other spheres of life. How many times have you started writ­ing a birth­day card for a friend, and found your­self instinc­tively com­pos­ing a set of bul­let points list­ing this person’s chief virtues, notable char­ac­ter traits, and the most impor­tant / amus­ing moments of your friend­ship. The creep­ing ubiq­uity of the rhetor­i­cal style of Pow­er­point (Tufte’s essay here) is just one exam­ple of the tremen­dous social impact of a habit­u­ated model of com­mu­nica­tive prac­tices that’s run amok.
What does the future hold, in terms of enter­prise ven­dor con­trol over every­day work­ing expe­ri­ences? I’ve writ­ten before on the idea that the days of the mono­lithic enter­prise sys­tems are num­bered, mak­ing the point along the way that these behe­moths are the result of a top-down, one-size-for-all approach. I think the same is true of the cur­rent approach to col­lab­o­ra­tion solu­tions and work­ing envi­ron­ments. And so I was happy to see Andrew McAfee of Har­vard Busi­ness School make sev­eral strong points about how enter­prise col­lab­o­ra­tion efforts will real­ize greater suc­cess by *reduc­ing* the amount of struc­ture imposed on their major ele­ments — roles, work­flows, arti­facts, and rela­tion­ships — in advance of actual use.
McAfee sees con­sid­er­able ben­e­fit in new approaches to enter­prise IT invest­ment and man­age­ment that reduce the top-down and imposed nature of enter­prise envi­ron­ments and solu­tions, in favor of emer­gent struc­tures cre­ated by the peo­ple who must work suc­cess­fully within them. McAfee advo­cates allow­ing staff to cre­ate the iden­ti­ties, struc­tures and pat­terns that will orga­nize and gov­ern their col­lab­o­ra­tion envi­ron­ments as nec­es­sary, in an emer­gent fash­ion, instead of fix­ing these aspects long before users begin to col­lab­o­rate.
McAfee says:
“When I look at a lot of cor­po­rate col­lab­o­ra­tion tech­nolo­gies after spend­ing time at Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Flickr, and Blog­ger I am struck by how reg­i­mented, inflex­i­ble, and lim­ited the cor­po­rate stuff seems, because it does some or all of the following:

• Gives users iden­ti­ties before they start using the tech­nol­ogy. These iden­ti­ties assign them cer­tain roles, priv­i­leges, and access rights, and exclude them from oth­ers. These iden­ti­ties almost always also place them within the exist­ing orga­ni­za­tional struc­ture and for­mal cor­po­rate hierarchy.
• Con­tains few truly blank pages. Instead, it has lots of templates–for meet­ings, for project track­ing, for doc­u­ments and reports, etc.
• Has tons of explicit or implicit work­flow– seqences [sic] of tasks that must be exe­cuted in order.

How much of this struc­ture is nec­es­sary? How much is valu­able? Well, the clear suc­cess sto­ries of Web 2.0 demon­strate that for at least some types of com­mu­nity and col­lab­o­ra­tion, none of it is.“
The crit­i­cal ques­tion is then “what types of com­mu­nity and col­lab­o­ra­tion require which approaches to cre­at­ing struc­ture, and when?” As any­one who’s used a poorly or overly struc­tured col­lab­o­ra­tion (or other enter­prise) tool knows, the result­ing envi­ron­ment is often anal­o­gous to a feu­dal soci­ety designed and man­aged by crypto-technical over­lords; one in which most users feel as if they are serfs bound to the land for in per­pe­tu­ity in order to sup­port the leisure-time and war-making indul­gences of a small class of share­hold­ing nobil­ity.
Answer­ing these ques­tions with con­fi­dence based on expe­ri­ence will likely take time in the range of years, and require numer­ous failed exper­i­ments. There’s a larger con­text to take into account: the strug­gle of enter­prise soft­ware ven­dors to extend their reach and longevity by dom­i­nat­ing the lan­guage of col­lab­o­ra­tion and the range of offer­ings is one part of a much broader effort by soci­ety to under­stand dra­matic shifts in our ways of work­ing, and the social struc­tures that are both dri­ven by and shape these new ways of work­ing. And so there are sev­eral impor­tant ideas and ques­tions under­ly­ing McAfee’s assess­ment that social sys­tem design­ers should under­stand.
One of the most impor­tant is that the notion of “col­lab­o­ra­tion” is con­cep­tual short­hand for how you work, who you work with, and what you do. In other words, it’s a dis­til­la­tion of your pro­fes­sional iden­tity. Your role in a col­lab­o­ra­tion envi­ron­ment defines who you are within that envi­ron­ment.
More impor­tantly, from the per­spec­tive of growth and devel­op­ment, your sys­tem assigned role deter­mines who you can *become*. Knowl­edge work­ers are val­ued for their skills, expe­ri­ence, pro­fes­sional net­works, pub­lic rep­u­ta­tions, and many other fluid, con­text depen­dent attrib­utes. And so lock­ing down their iden­ti­ties in advance strips them of a sub­stan­tial pro­por­tion of their cur­rent value, and simul­ta­ne­ously reduces their abil­ity to adapt, inno­vate, and respond to envi­ron­men­tal changes by shift­ing their think­ing or prac­tices. In plain terms, deter­min­ing their iden­ti­ties in advance pre­cludes the cre­ation of future value.
Another impor­tant under­ly­ing idea is the impor­tance of prop­erly under­stand­ing the value and util­ity of dif­fer­ing approaches to sys­tem­ati­za­tion in dif­fer­ing con­texts. McAfee’s assess­ment of the unhealthy con­se­quences of impos­ing too much struc­ture in advance is use­ful for social sys­tem design­ers (such as infor­ma­tion archi­tects and knowl­edge man­agers), because it makes the out­comes of implicit design strate­gies and assump­tions clear and tan­gi­ble, in terms of the neg­a­tive effects on the even­tual users of the col­lab­o­ra­tion envi­ron­ment. For com­plex and evolv­ing group set­tings like the mod­ern enter­prise, cre­at­ing too much struc­ture in advance points to a mis­placed under­stand­ing of the value and role of design and archi­tec­ture.
Fun­da­men­tally, it indi­cates an over­es­ti­ma­tion of the value of the activ­ity of sys­tem­atiz­ing (design­ing) col­lab­o­ra­tion envi­ron­ments to high lev­els of detail, and with­out recog­ni­tion for evo­lu­tion­ary dynam­ics. The design or struc­ture of any col­lab­o­ra­tion envi­ron­ment — of any social sys­tem — is only valu­able for how well it encour­ages rela­tion­ships and activ­ity which advance the goals of the orga­ni­za­tion and it’s mem­bers. The value of a designer in the effort to cre­ate a col­lab­o­ra­tive com­mu­nity lies in the abil­ity to cre­ate designs that lead to effec­tive col­lab­o­ra­tion, not in the num­ber or speci­ficity of the designs they pro­duce, and espe­cially not in the arti­facts cre­ated dur­ing design — the tem­plates, work­flows, roles, and other McAfee men­tioned above. To sim­plify the dif­fer­ent views of what’s appro­pri­ate into two arti­fi­cially seg­mented camps, the [older] view that results in the pre­ma­ture cre­ation of too much struc­ture val­i­dates the design of things / arti­facts / sta­tic assem­blies, whereas the newer view valu­ing min­i­mal and emer­gent struc­tures acknowl­edges the greater effi­cacy of design­ing dynamic sys­tems / flows / frame­works.
The overly spe­cific and rigid design of many col­lab­o­ra­tion sys­tem com­po­nents com­ing from the older design view­point in fact says much about how large, com­plex enter­prises choose to inter­pret their own char­ac­ters, and cre­ate tools accord­ingly. Too often, a desire to achieve total­ity lies at the heart of this approach.
Of course, most total­i­ties only make sense — exhibit coher­ence — when viewed from within, and when using the lan­guage and con­cepts of the total­ity itself. The result is that attempts to achieve total­ity of design for many com­plex con­texts (like col­lab­o­ra­tion within enter­prises large or small) rep­re­sent a self-defeating approach. That the approach is self-defeating is gen­er­ally ignored, because the pur­suit of total­ity is a self-serving exer­cise in power val­i­da­tion, that ben­e­fits power hold­ers by con­sum­ing resources poten­tially used for other pur­poses, for exam­ple, to under­mine their power.
With the chimera of total­ity set in proper con­text, it’s pos­si­ble to see how col­lab­o­ra­tion envi­ron­ments — at least in their most poorly con­ceived man­i­fes­ta­tions — will resem­ble vir­tual retreads of Tay­lorism, wherein the real accom­plish­ment is to jus­tify the effort and expense involved in cre­at­ing the sys­tem by point­ing at an exces­sive quan­tity of pre­de­ter­mined struc­ture await­ing habi­ta­tion and use by dis­en­fran­chised staff.
At present, I see two diver­gent and com­pet­ing trends in the realm of enter­prise solu­tions and user expe­ri­ences. The first trend is toward homo­gene­ity of the work­ing envi­ron­ment with large amounts of struc­ture imposed in advance, exem­pli­fied by com­pre­hen­sive col­lab­o­ra­tion suites and archi­tec­tures such as MSOf­fice / Share­point, or IBM’s Work­place.
The sec­ond trend is toward het­ero­gene­ity in the struc­tures inform­ing the work­ing envi­ron­ment, vis­i­ble as vari­able pat­terns and locuses of col­lab­o­ra­tion estab­lished by fluid groups that rely on adhoc assort­ment of tools from dif­fer­ent sources (Base­Camp, GMail, social book­mark­ing ser­vices, RSS syn­di­ca­tion of social media struc­tures, com­mu­ni­ties of prac­tice, busi­ness ser­vices from ASP providers, open source appli­ca­tions, etc.).
But this itself is a short term view, when sit­u­a­tion within a longer term con­text is nec­es­sary. It is com­mon for sys­tems or envi­ron­ments of all sizes and com­plex­i­ties to oscil­late cycli­cally from greater to lesser degrees of struc­ture, along a con­tin­uüm rang­ing from homo­ge­neous to het­ero­ge­neous. In the short term view then, the quest for total­ity equates to homo­gene­ity, or even efforts at dom­i­na­tion. In the long term view, how­ever, the quest for total­ity could indi­cate an imma­ture ecosys­tem that is not diverse, but may become so in time.
Apply­ing two (poten­tial) lessons from ecol­ogy — the value of diver­sity as an enhancer of over­all resilience in sys­tems, and the ten­dency of mono­cul­tures to exhibit high fragility — to McAfee’s points on emer­gence, as well as the con­tin­uüm view of shift­ing degress of homo­gene­ity, should tell us that col­lab­o­ra­tion solu­tion design­ers would be wise to do three things:

1. Adopt the new design view­point and focus on design­ing struc­tures that allow col­lab­o­ra­tors to cre­ate value
2. Spec­ify as lit­tle struc­ture of any kind in advance as possible
3. Antic­i­pate the emer­gence of new archi­tec­tural ele­ments, and allow for their incor­po­ra­tion under the guid­ance of the com­mu­nity of collaborators

The end result should be an enter­prise approach to col­lab­o­ra­tion that empha­sizes the design of infra­struc­ture for com­mu­ni­ties that cre­ate their own struc­tures. Big ven­dors be wary of this enlight­ened point of view, unless you’re will­ing to respond in kind.

A few months ago I came across a pre­sen­ta­tion titled Orga­ni­za­tions in Cri­sis and Decline, by Ran­dall Dun­ham. After giv­ing exam­ples of orga­ni­za­tions in cri­sis and decline that include Kmart, Gen­eral Motors, United Air­lines, and Michael Jack­son. (inter­est­ing exam­ple of an enter­prise…), Dun­ham goes on to sum­ma­rize typ­i­cal symp­toms of cri­sis, the strate­gic con­se­quences of decline, and 10 behav­iors of unhealthy orga­ni­za­tions.
I came across this while doing some research on how the struc­tures and cul­tures of orga­ni­za­tions influ­ence modes of think­ing, resilience, and deci­sion mak­ing, so this is related to some of my post­ings on enter­prise soft­ware. It might be a while before I have the chance to write up all the ideas, so I’ll share Dunham’s mate­r­ial now.
Why is this of note to IAs? Quite a few Infor­ma­tion archi­tects (prac­ti­tion­ers, not just those with the title…) are actively look­ing for effec­tive tools and modes of under­stand­ing to help frame and man­age enter­prise prob­lems.
Under­stand­ing the signs of decline and cri­sis in orga­ni­za­tions can help infor­ma­tion archi­tects and other change agents under­stand the envi­ron­men­tal con­text of a sit­u­a­tion in the crit­i­cal early stages of set­ting expec­ta­tions and roles, and before it’s “too late”, when every­one at the man­age­ment table has strong opin­ions they must defend. In other words, before mak­ing a leap is into an active project, a plan­ning and bud­get­ing cycle, a strate­gic vision ses­sion, etc.
I see (at least) two very impor­tant aspects of a sit­u­a­tion that Dunham’s warn­ing signs could help iden­tify; how healthy an orga­ni­za­tion is, and what lat­i­tude for activ­ity and change is avail­able. Build­ing on this, these cri­te­ria can help iden­tify sit­u­a­tions to avoid or be wary of. Of course, orga­ni­za­tions in cri­sis and decline can present oppor­tu­ni­ties as well as risks, but some­times the ship is going down no mat­ter how much you try to patch the holes…
For those with­out pow­er­point, I’m going to present some of the mate­r­ial here as text, with acknowl­edg­ment that I’m bor­row­ing directly from Dun­ham, who him­self cred­its this source: Mis­che, M.A. (2001). Ten warn­ing signs of strate­gic Decline. In Strate­gic Renewal: Becom­ing a High-Performance Orga­ni­za­tion (pp. 25–30). Upper Sad­dle River, NJ: Pren­tice Hall.
Typ­i­cal Symp­toms of Crisis/Decline

• Lower earn­ings & revenues
• Increased employee turnover
• Reduced mar­ket presence
• Decrease in cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion & interest
• Increas­ing costs & high struc­tural costs

Strate­gic Con­se­quences of Crisis/Decline

• Lower mar­ket value
• Incon­sis­tent strategies
• Mis­align­ment of inter­nal strate­gies & exter­nal goals
• Dimin­ished capac­ity to attract top talent
• Increased vul­ner­a­bil­ity

10 Behav­iors that Sig­nal Decline

• The orga­ni­za­tion exhibits a lack of under­stand­ing the envi­ron­men­tal and eco­nomic real­i­ties con­fronting it, or is in denial
• The man­age­ment of the orga­ni­za­tion is arro­gant with regard to its view of the world & assess­ment of its inter­nal com­pe­ten­cies. Ex: Icarus Paradox
• The orga­ni­za­tion has lost per­spec­tive with respect to cus­tomers, prod­ucts, sup­pli­ers, and competitors
• Man­age­ment and employ­ees have an insu­lar focus or pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with inter­nal processes, inter­nal mea­sure­ments, and politics
• The orga­ni­za­tion has lost its sense of urgency and lacks an atti­tude of self-determination
• The orga­ni­za­tion is rely­ing on his­tor­i­cal and poorly con­cep­tu­al­ized or inap­pro­pri­ate busi­ness strate­gies and tra­di­tional man­age­ment meth­ods to address new & dif­fer­ent challenges
• The orga­ni­za­tion has the propen­sity to repeat mis­takes and fails to learn from past experiences
• The orga­ni­za­tion has low or slow inno­va­tion prac­tices and is late to mar­ket with new products/services
• The orga­ni­za­tion has a ten­dency to recy­cle mar­gin­ally per­form­ing managers
• The orga­ni­za­tion relies exclu­sively on inter­nal tal­ent as a source of leadership

Key Fac­tors that Con­tribute to Decline

• Age of the orga­ni­za­tion: Older, more estab­lished firms may rely on legacy practices
• Size of the orga­ni­za­tion: Large firms with many ver­ti­cal lev­els can have trou­ble adapting
• Finan­cial suc­cess and past per­for­mance: Past suc­cess can lead to desire to fol­low same path in hopes of future success
• Own­er­ship and equity struc­ture: Is there account­abil­ity at all times to out­side agents?
• Envi­ron­men­tal influ­ences: Exter­nal shocks
• Abil­ity to learn and dis­cern pat­terns: Lack of learn­ing orga­ni­za­tion culture
• Certainty/uncertainty: Effec­tive­ness of change management
• Lead­er­ship: Young & inex­pe­ri­enced with­out desire to learn

Suc­cess Can Drive Crisis

• The same processes that lead to suc­cess in an orga­ni­za­tion can also lead to failure
• This is because suc­cess pro­motes rigid­ity, resis­tance to change, and habit­ual response
• Biggest prob­lem — peo­ple learn the ‘right’ way to solve a prob­lem and do that over and over again, even if that way will no longer solve the problem

It’s true these are quite gen­eral. Nat­u­rally, the art is in know­ing how to apply them as cri­te­ria, or inter­peret what you found. As a quick test of accu­racy, I’ve used the behav­iors and warn­ing signs to ret­ro­spec­tively review sev­eral of the orga­ni­za­tions I’ve seen from the inside. When those orga­ni­za­tions showed sev­eral of the behav­iors and warn­ing signs at an aggre­gate level (not nec­es­sar­ily my group, but the whole enter­prise) then the strate­gic con­se­quence dun­ham men­tioned were vis­i­ble at the same time.
From a prac­ti­cal per­spec­tive, a rat­ing scale or some indi­ca­tors of rel­a­tive degree would be very use­ful. In order to gauge whether to stay or go, you need to under­stand the inten­sity of the decline or cri­sis and what action you can take: for exam­ple, do you have time to go back to the cabin to save your hand­writ­ten screen­play before the ship sinks?

This week­end, some of my ear­lier posts dis­cussing the user expe­ri­ence of Lotus Notes sur­faced in the Notes com­mu­nity. Ed Brill — in a post­ing titled Mary Beth has been tak­ing on the crit­ics — ref­er­enced my men­tion of how the head of the Notes UI team was employ­ing user research as a bridge to cus­tomers. Ed com­pli­mented the design team for reach­ing out to crit­ics in pub­lic. This is a well-deserved pat on the back. Yet it falls short of rec­og­niz­ing the more impor­tant point that direct user research should be a basic com­po­nent of any company’s over­all strat­egy and plan­ning for long term suc­cess (or sur­vival).
Why? User research helps build cus­tomer rela­tion­ships, fur­ther design efforts, and iden­tify new busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ties when applied across audi­ences (inter­nal and exter­nal con­stituen­cies) and per­spec­tives (mar­ket­ing, sales, prod­uct devel­op­ment), and with an eye for needs beyond imme­di­ate feed­back. This sort of engage­ment with cus­tomers of a soft­ware prod­uct (or any kind of prod­uct) should *not* be spe­cial or note­wor­thy — it should hap­pen all the time. Con­tin­u­ously. I’m think­ing of Jared Spool’s remarks dur­ing his keynote at UI10, to the effect that the user expe­ri­ence per­spec­tive is most suc­cess­ful when it it is a basic com­po­nent of a company’s cul­ture, and thus an assumed aspect of every ini­tia­tive.
In fact, in a socially trans­par­ent, net­worked, and aware envi­ron­ment like the cur­rent FutureP­re­sent, user research serves as a fun­da­men­tal, indis­pens­able form of research and devel­op­ment that com­pa­nies and orga­ni­za­tions must sup­port as part of their port­fo­lio of meth­ods for seek­ing broad based envi­ron­men­tal feed­back (also here). I’ll go so far as to say that user research may move beyond the realm of essen­tial cor­po­rate R&D, and qual­ify as gen­uine basic research.
BTW: maybe it’s just me, but isn’t it a bit omi­nous that the tag line for Notes 7 is “Inno­vate. Col­lab­o­rate. Dom­i­nate.” ? Sounds like some­thing the Borg might say if you asked them how to make breakfast…

Peter Mer­holz observes that enter­prise soft­ware is being eaten away from below, by appli­ca­tions such as Move­able Type, and inno­va­tors such as Social­Text.
“These smaller point solu­tions, sys­tems that actu­ally address the chal­lenges that peo­ple face (instead of sim­ply cre­at­ing more prob­lems of their own, prob­lems that require hir­ing ser­vice staff from the soft­ware devel­op­ers), these solu­tions are going to spread through­out orga­ni­za­tions and sup­plant enter­prise soft­ware the same way that PCs sup­planted main­frames.
I sure wouldn’t want to be work­ing in enter­prise soft­ware right now. Sure, it’s a mas­sive indus­try, and it will take a long time to die, but the pro­gres­sion is clear, and, frankly, inevitable.“
Indeed it is. Though there’s con­sid­er­able ana­lyst hoopla about ris­ing enter­prise con­tent man­age­ment or ECM spend­ing and IT invest­ment (see also In Focus: Con­tent Man­age­ment Heats Up, Imag­ing Shifts Toward SMBs), we’re in the midst of a larger and longer term cycle of evo­lu­tion in which cheaper, faster, more agile com­peti­tors to estab­lished mar­ket lead­ers are fol­low­ing the clas­sic mar­ket entry strat­egy of attack­ing the bot­tom of the pyra­mid. (The pyra­mid is a hier­ar­chi­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of a given mar­ket or set of prod­ucts; at the top of the pyra­mid sit the more expen­sive and mature prod­ucts which offer more fea­tures, capa­bil­i­ties, qual­ity, or com­plex­ity; the lower lev­els of the pyra­mid include lower cost prod­ucts which offer fewer fea­tures.)
What’s most inter­est­ing about the way this pat­tern is play­ing out in the arena of enter­prise con­tent man­age­ment solu­tions is that the new com­peti­tors were not at first attack­ing from the bot­tom as a delib­er­ate strat­egy, think of Move­able­Type, but they have quite quickly moved to this approach as with the recent release of Alfresco. The dif­fer­ent ori­gins of Sixa­part and Alfresco may have some bear­ing on their dif­fer­ent mar­ket entry approaches: Sixa­part was a per­sonal pub­lish­ing plat­form that’s grown into a con­tent man­age­ment tool, whereas Alfresco’s intented audi­ence was enter­prise cus­tomers from day one. I’d wager the founders of Alfresco looked to Red­Hat as an exam­ple of a busi­ness model built on Open­Source soft­ware, and saw oppor­tu­nity in the enter­prise con­tent man­age­ment space, espe­cially con­cern­ing user expe­ri­ence annd usabil­ity weak­nesses in ECM plat­forms.
There’s an easy (if gen­eral) par­al­lel in the auto­mo­tive indus­try: from Amer­i­can dom­i­nance of the domes­tic U.S. mar­ket for auto­mo­biles in the post-WWII decades, suc­ces­sive waves of com­peti­tors moved into the U.S. auto­mo­bile mar­ket from the bot­tom of the pyra­mid, offer­ing less expen­sive or higher qual­ity auto­mo­biles with the same or sim­i­lar fea­tures. The major Japan­ese firms such as Honda, Toy­ota, and Nis­san were first, fol­lowed by Korean firms such as Hyundai and Dae­woo. It’s plain that some of the older com­pa­nies sit­ting at the top of the pyra­mid are in fact dying, both lit­er­ally and fig­u­ra­tively: GM is finan­cially crip­pled and faces oner­ous finan­cial bur­dens — to the point of bank­ruptcy — as it attempts to pay for the health­care of it’s own aging (dying) work­force.
So what’s in the future?
For auto mak­ers it’s pos­si­ble that Chi­nese or South Amer­i­can man­u­fac­tur­ers will be next to enter the domes­tic U.S. mar­ket, using sim­i­lar attacks at the bot­tom of the pyra­mid.
For enter­prise soft­ware, I think orga­ni­za­tions will turn away from mono­lithic and expen­sive sys­tems with ter­ri­ble user expe­ri­ences — and cor­re­spond­ingly low lev­els of sat­is­fac­tion, qual­ity, and effi­cacy — as the best means of meet­ing busi­ness needs, and shift to a mixed palette of seman­ti­cally inte­grated capa­bil­i­ties or ser­vices deliv­ered via the Inter­net. These capa­bil­i­ties will orig­i­nate from diverse ven­dors or providers, and expose cus­tomized sets of func­tion­al­ity and infor­ma­tion spe­cific to the indi­vid­ual enter­prise. Staff will access and encounter these capa­bil­i­ties via a mul­ti­plic­ity of chan­nels and user expe­ri­ences; dash­board or por­tal style aggre­ga­tors, RIA rich inter­net appli­ca­tions, mobile devices, inter­faces for RSS and other micro-content for­mats.
David Wein­berger thinks it will be small pieces loosely joined together. A group of entre­pre­neurs thinks it might look some­thing like what Thingamy claims to be.
Regard­less, it’s surely no coin­ci­dence that I find a blog post on mar­ket pyra­mids and entry strate­gies put up by some­one work­ing at an enter­prise soft­ware startup…

At least accord­ing to the Boston Globe arti­cle titled Don’t under­es­ti­mate the value of social skills, in which Pene­lope Trunk quotes an HBS fac­ulty mem­ber as fol­lows:
’In fact, across the board, in a wide vari­ety of busi­nesses, peo­ple would rather work with some­one who is lik­able and incom­pe­tent than with some­one who is skilled and obnox­ious, said Tiziana Cas­ciaro, a pro­fes­sor at Har­vard Busi­ness School. “How we value com­pe­tence changes depend­ing on whether we like some­one or not,” she says.‘
I guess this explains how we ended up with George W. Bush as President…

A few months ago, I put up a post­ing on Men­tal Mod­els Lotus Notes, and Resililence. It focused on my chronic inabil­ity to learn how not to send email with Lous Notes. I posted about Notes, but what led me to explore resilience in the con­text of men­tal mod­els was the sur­pris­ing lack of acknowl­edge­ment of the scale of hur­ri­cane Kat­rina I came across at the time. For exam­ple, the day the lev­ees failed, the front page of the New York Times dig­i­tal edi­tion car­ried a gigan­tic head­line say­ing ‘Lev­ees Fail! New Orleans floods!’. And yet no one in the office at the time even men­tioned what hap­pened.
My con­clu­sion was that peo­ple were sim­ply unable to accept the idea that a major met­ro­pol­i­tan area in the U.S. could pos­si­bly be the set­ting for such a tragedy, and so they refused to absorb it — because it didn’t fit in with their men­tal mod­els for how the world works. Today, I came across a Resilience Sci­ence post­ing titled New Orleans and Dis­as­ter Soci­ol­ogy that sup­ports this line of think­ing, while it dis­cusses some of the inter­est­ing ways that seman­tics and men­tal mod­els come into play in rela­tion to dis­as­ters.
Quot­ing exten­sively from an arti­cle in The Chron­i­cle of Higher Edu­ca­tion titled Dis­as­ter Soci­ol­o­gists Study What Went Wrong in the Response to the Hur­ri­canes, but Will Pol­icy Mak­ers Lis­ten? the post­ing calls out how nar­row slices of media cov­er­age dri­ven by blurred seman­tic and con­tex­tual under­stand­ings, inac­cu­rately frame social responses to dis­as­ter sit­u­a­tions in terms of group panic and the implied break­down of order and soci­ety.
“The false idea of post­dis­as­ter panic grows partly from sim­ple seman­tic con­fu­sion, said Michael K. Lin­dell, a psy­chol­o­gist who directs the Haz­ard Reduc­tion and Recov­ery Cen­ter at Texas A&M Uni­ver­sity at Col­lege Sta­tion. ‘A reporter will stick a micro­phone in someone’s face and ask, ‘Well, what did you do when the explo­sion went off?’ And the per­son will answer, ‘I pan­icked.’ And then they’ll pro­ceed to describe a very log­i­cal, ratio­nal action in which they pro­tected them­selves and looked out for peo­ple around them. What they mean by ‘panic’ is just ‘I got very fright­ened.’ But when you say ‘I pan­icked,’ it rein­forces this idea that there’s a thin veneer of civ­i­liza­tion, which van­ishes after a dis­as­ter, and that you need out­side author­i­ties and the mil­i­tary to restore order. But really, peo­ple usu­ally do very well for them­selves, thank you.‘
Men­tal mod­els come into play when the arti­cle goes on to talk about the ways that the emer­gency man­age­ment agen­cies are orga­nized and struc­tured, and how they approach and under­stand sit­u­a­tions by default. With the new Home­land Secu­rity par­a­digm, all inci­dents require com­mand and con­trol approaches that assume a ded­i­cated and intel­li­gent enemy — obvi­ously not the way to man­age a hur­ri­cane response.
“Mr. Lin­dell, of Texas A&M, agreed, say­ing he feared that pol­icy mak­ers in Wash­ing­ton had taken the wrong lessons from Kat­rina. The employ­ees of the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity, he said, ‘are mostly drawn from the Depart­ment of Defense, the Depart­ment of Jus­tice, and from police depart­ments. They’re firmly com­mit­ted to a command-and-control model.’ (Just a few days ago, Pres­i­dent Bush may have pushed the process one step fur­ther: He sug­gested that the Depart­ment of Defense take con­trol of relief efforts after major nat­ural dis­as­ters.)
“The habits of mind cul­ti­vated by mil­i­tary and law-enforcement per­son­nel have their virtues, Mr. Lin­dell said, but they don’t always fit dis­as­ter sit­u­a­tions. ‘They come from orga­ni­za­tions where they’re deal­ing with an intel­li­gent adver­sary. So they want to keep infor­ma­tion secret; ‘it’s only shared on a need-to-know basis. But emer­gency man­agers and med­ical per­son­nel want infor­ma­tion shared as widely as pos­si­ble because they have to rely on per­sua­sion to get peo­ple to coöper­ate. The prob­lem with putting FEMA into the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity is that it’s like an organ trans­plant. What we’ve seen over the past four years is basi­cally organ rejec­tion.‘
If I read this cor­rectly, mis­aligned orga­ni­za­tional cul­tures lie at the bot­tom of the whole prob­lem. I’m still curi­ous about the con­nec­tions between an organization’s cul­ture, and the men­tal mod­els that indi­vid­u­als use. Can a group have a col­lec­tive men­tal model?
Accoridng to Col­lec­tive Men­tal State and Indi­vid­ual Agency: Qual­i­ta­tive Fac­tors in Social Sci­ence Expla­na­tion it’s pos­si­ble, and in fact the whole idea of this col­lec­tive men­tal state is a black hole as far as qual­i­ta­tive social research and under­stand­ing are concerned.

I can’t take credit for writ­ing this para­ble about the rela­tion­ship of infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture and inter­ac­tion design — that goes to another mem­ber of the IAI — but I can help share it.
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A scor­pion who was an Infor­ma­tion Archi­tect and a frog who was an Inter­ac­tion Designer were stand­ing on the bank of a rag­ing river of infor­ma­tion.
“Let’s define the prob­lem” said the IA. “I can’t swim, but I need to get across that river.“
“Well — I can swim” said the ID “I could take you across, but I’m afraid that when we get halfway, you might pull out a Venn Dia­gram and hit me over the head with it.“
“Never!” cried the IA. “Let us brave the river of infor­ma­tion together!“
And so they dived in.
When they were halfway across the river, the IA took a out a wire­frame and stabbed the ID in the back with it.
As they both slowly sank beneath the waves, the ID cried “Why did you do that? Now we’ll both drown!“
Replied the Infor­ma­tion Archi­tect: “Because I was defined that way.“
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I think the mes­sage is clear: What truly mat­ters is get­ting across the river. But that can be very hard to see, if your per­spec­tive doesn’t allow it.
Case in point: Spring of 2001, lit­er­ally a week after the bub­ble burst, I was in Vegas with the rest of the Expe­ri­ence Design Group from Zefer. We were in the mid­dle of one of those impos­si­ble to imag­ine now but com­pletely sen­si­ble at the time 150 per­son design group sum­mit meet­ings about the company’s design method­ol­ogy, prac­tice, group struc­ture, etc.
Our IPO had just gone south, very per­ma­nently, but that wouldn’t by clear for sev­eral months. After a mini-rebellion at which we the assem­bled design con­sul­tants voted to skip the summit’s offi­cially sanc­tioned train­ing and dis­cus­sion activ­i­ties in favor of lots of self-organized cross-practice some­thing or other ses­sions, I ended up sit­ting in a room with the rest of the Usabil­ity and IA folks from the other offices.
Who promptly decided to define all the other design spe­cial­i­ties in detail, because doing so was the key to under­stand­ing our own roles. From here we were to move on to item­ize all the tasks and design doc­u­men­ta­tion asso­ci­ated with each dis­ci­pline, and then define the implicit and explicit con­nec­tions to the spe­cific IA deliv­er­ables. In alpha­bet­i­cal order. Using flip charts, white boards, stick­ies, and notepads.
After five min­utes, I went and to see what the Visual Design­ers were doing. They were sit­ting in a cir­cle in a large and quiet room, dis­cussing their favorite exam­ples of good design in prod­ucts, expe­ri­ences, typog­ra­phy, inter­faces; their goal was to help show the value of design prac­tices to clients. Some of them were also prac­tic­ing yoga, though I’m not sure that was related. The over­all expe­ri­ence was quite a bit more — engag­ing. And use­ful / effec­tive / rel­e­vant, espe­cially out­side the bound­aries of the group. The visual design­ers wanted to get across the river, while the IA’s were taken over by the com­plu­sion to be dili­gent infor­ma­tion archi­tects.
Maybe it’s a per­spec­tive difference?

David Brooks Op-Ed col­umn The Art of Intel­li­gence in today’s NY Times is strongly rel­e­vant to ques­tions of user research method, design phi­los­o­phy, and under­stand­ing user expe­ri­ences.
Brooks opens by assert­ing that that US Intel­li­gence com­mu­nity shifted away from qual­i­ta­tive / inter­per­a­tive research and analy­sis meth­ods to quan­ti­ta­tive research and analy­sis meth­ods dur­ing the 60’s in an attempt to legit­imize con­clu­sions in the fash­ion of the phys­i­cal sci­ences. From this begin­ning, Brooks’ con­clu­sion is that the basic epis­te­mo­log­i­cal shift in thought about what sorts of infor­ma­tion are rel­e­vant to under­stand­ing the needs and views of groups of peo­ple (nations, soci­eties, polit­i­cal lead­er­ship cir­cles) yielded inter­pre­ta­tions of their views and plans which were either use­less or incor­rect, mod­els which then lead deci­sion mak­ers to a series of dra­matic pol­icy errors — exam­ples of which we still see to this day.

Brooks con­trasts the “unimag­i­na­tive” quan­ti­ta­tive inter­pre­ta­tions assem­bled by sta­tis­ti­cal spe­cial­ists with the broad mix of sources and per­spec­tives which cul­tural and social thinkers in the 50’s used to under­stand Amer­i­can and other soci­eties in nar­ra­tive, qual­i­ta­tive ways.
Accord­ing to Brooks, nar­ra­tive, nov­el­is­tic ways of under­stand­ing pro­vided much bet­ter — more insight­ful, imag­i­na­tive, accure­ate, and use­ful — advice on how Amer­i­cans and oth­ers under­stood the world, open­ing the way to insight into strate­gic trends and oppor­tu­ni­ties. I’ve read many of the books he uses as exam­ples — they’re some of the clas­sics on social / cul­tural / his­tor­i­cal read­ing lists — of the qual­i­ta­tive tra­di­tion, and taken away vivid pic­tures of the times and places they describe that I use to this day when called on to pro­vide per­spec­tive on those envi­ron­ments.
Per­haps it’s implied, but what Brooks doesn’t men­tion is the obvi­ous point that both approaches — qual­i­ta­tive and quan­ti­ta­tive — are nec­es­sary to craft­ing fully-dimensioned pic­tures of peo­ple. Mov­ing explic­itly to the con­text of user research, qual­i­ta­tive analy­sis can tell us what peo­ple want or need or think or feel, but num­bers give spe­cific answers regard­ing things like what they’re will­ing or able to spend, how much time they will invest in try­ing to find a piece of infor­ma­tion, or how many inter­rup­tions they will tol­er­ate before quit­ting a task in frus­tra­tion.
When a designer must choose between inter­ac­tion pat­terns, nav­i­ga­tion labels, prod­uct imagery, or task flows, they need both types of under­stand­ing to make an informed deci­sion.
Some excerpts from Brooks’ col­umn:
“They relied on their knowl­edge of his­tory, lit­er­a­ture, phi­los­o­phy and the­ol­ogy to rec­og­nize social pat­terns and grasp emerg­ing trends.“
This sounds like a strong syn­thetic approach to user research.
“I’ll believe the sys­tem has been reformed when pol­icy mak­ers are pre­sented with com­pet­ing reports, signed by indi­vid­ual thinkers, and are no longer pre­sented with anony­mous, bureau­crat­i­cally homog­e­nized, bul­leted points that pre­tend to be the prod­uct of sci­en­tific con­sen­sus.“
“But the prob­lem is not bureau­cratic. It’s epis­te­mo­log­i­cal. Indi­vid­u­als are good at using intu­ition and imag­i­na­tion to under­stand other humans. We know from recent advances in neu­ro­science, pop­u­lar­ized in Mal­colm Gladwell’s “Blink,” that the human mind can per­form fan­tas­ti­cally com­pli­cated feats of sub­con­scious pat­tern recog­ni­tion. There is a pow­er­ful back­stage process we use to inter­pret the world and the peo­ple around us.“
“When you try to ana­lyze human affairs using a process that is sys­tem­atic, cod­i­fied and bureau­cratic, as the CIA does, you anes­thetize all of these tools. You don’t pro­duce rea­son — you pro­duce what Irv­ing Kris­tol called the ele­phan­ti­a­sis of reason.”