in this issue

Enterprise Service Oriented Architectures

Accessibility Is Not Enough

8 guidelines for usability testing

What Have You Done for Your Customers Lately?

Geography matters: Mapping human development and digital access.

Net Pioneer Wants New Internet

Practical Usability: Beyond User Testing

James McGovern
Oliver Sims
Ashish Jain,
Mark Little

Amazon's book description:

If you want an introductory book on service-oriented architectures, this is not it! If you desire to learn advanced concepts of architecting, building and deploying enterprise service oriented architectures then this is the ultimate guide. The author team is comprised of an enterprise architect from a Fortune 100 Financial Services firm, a thought leader in building enterprise business components, a well-respected industry visionary on transactions and orchestration and an architect from the leading enterprise integration company. This book discusses integration challenges, commonly made mistakes while providing guidance how to build enterprise class services correctly the first time. Concepts and practices contained within this guide have been successfully implemented in multiple mission-critical enterprises. If you are responsible for understanding, designing or implementing an Enterprise Service Oriented Architecture, this book will provide the necessary information for you to be successful.
 

Recent innovations:  Development by performers, for performers. 

EPSScentral maintains a unique vantage point with regard to innovative technologies that inform performance support and performance centered design.  The annual PCD Awards, for example, provide a first-hand look at what brave and bold risk takers are introducing to the market to attain business performance through human performance.  I would like to focus for a moment on one such innovation that emerged from the 2005 PCD Awards:  BriteWorks from BriteSoft Corporation.   

BriteSoft is a startup company currently being incubated in the Malaysian Multimedia Super Corridor under the auspices of the Multimedia Development Corporation (MDC).  The MDC is incorporated under the Companies Act of Malaysia, owned and funded by the Malaysian government. MDC combines ... "entrepreneurial efficiency and effectiveness of a private company with the decision-making and authority of a high-powered government agency."  The goal is to shape a world-class, world-leading environment that is based in a knowledge (rather than service) economy.  An amazing Bill of Guarantee from the Malaysian government and fostered by MDC provides an impressive list of incentives, complete management autonomy and a rich set of resources toward evolving globally competitive knowledge and technology-based companies. 

One of the key visions of performance support has been to place tools in the hands of those holding the performance vision to build and maintain systems that support business with minimal complexity for those who have to do the work.  A classic problem has been that IT resources have an engineering perspective that nicely address things like data integrity and the baseline business needs but fall short of supporting human performance needs with any acceptable level of complexity that truly supports the larger goals of business.  Performance support comes to the rescue but often too little, too late - particularly in the enterprise systems world.  

BriteWorks is an industrial-strength enterprise system development environment that puts the power in the hands of those possessing the business and performance visions.  It is essentially an environment that skips development entirely.  Its framework paradigm allows you to simply specify the system and at that point it is already developed and accessible.  Period!  In other words, there is no code development.  Instead you are provided with a rich set of resources for specifying everything from the data model to the interaction design to the interface elements to the security requirements.  The underlying code is already built in.  All you do is passively add metadata that reflects your specifications - and that's it.  Gartner tells us that BriteSoft's approach is how all new system development will take place in the very near future.  It's a natural evolutionary process - and BriteWorks it's one of the first kids on the block. 

When I visited BriteSoft headquarters in Kuala Lumpur back in September I observed a benchmarking activity which is the development of something called the Java Pet Store.  This is a standard e-business application based on a pet store metaphor that is used to measure the resource intensity of development environments, measured in time and lines of code.  The J2EE folks developed the Java Pet Store with 14,000 lines of computer code over several months.  The Microsoft .NET folks - with their web services and other time-saving resources - developed the Java Pet Store in just under eight weeks in about 3,500 lines of code.  The BriteSoft folks completed the work in less than four days (!) -with ZERO lines of code. 

That's right.  Zero code.  Because of BriteWorks' brilliant architecture, the code footprint never changes.  Only a bit of metadata shifts focus.  The epiphany was that there are not an infinite number of things that one needs to do to build an enterprise system.  So why not use frameworks to provide what you need, ready-made, except, or course, for your specific set of requirements.   Think about it.  BriteWorks reflects a very natural evolution of software tool development - but now ratcheted up to enterprise class and industrial strength. 

What does this mean for performance support?  It means moving away from external and extrinsic support and focusing on intrinsic, designed-from-the-outside-in performance-centered systems.  It means specifying your needs and NOT having to hand them off to programmers for interpretation and who-knows-how-it-will-come-out.  It means integrating disparate applications without requiring access to tired, old source code and its gatekeepers.  It means freedom to design systems that human beings can actually use while meeting the heaviest of duty business requirements -and doing so in days instead of months or weeks instead of years.  It means maintaining applications continuously through a quality formative evaluation process without having to put up with false barriers thrown up by those who own the code.  And it means allowing the IT people - who ultimately do a marvelous job with engineering - to do what they do best rather than setting them up for mediocrity and failure. 

There are a number of progressive organizations investing in BriteWorks licenses as we speak - and enjoying its benefits from the perspectives of business ROI, human and knowledge engineering and performance-centeredness.  Surely this will not be the first such tool set and surely we will see its features evolve into an even more powerful and focused platform for developing and maintaining enterprise business environments.  But for now it seems to me that BriteSoft principal Fazel Naghshineh is to knowledge work as W. Edwards Deming was to manufacturing.  Bravo!   

We look forward to seeing this 2005 PCD Award recipient shine in a number of industry verticals while ensuring business performance through human performance in the coming years.  Congratulations once again to BriteSoft Corp! 

Best regards, 
 

Gary J. Dickelman

Summary:
A strict focus on accessibility as a scorecard item doesn't help users with disabilities. To help these users accomplish critical tasks, you must adopt a usability perspective.

In professional web design circles, the usability testing session has become an essential component of any major project. Similar to focus groups in brand development and product launches, usability testing offers a rare opportunity to receive feedback from the very people the website is aimed at - before it's too late to do anything about it.

Four ways to maximize post-transaction customer retention opportunities.

What does your company do after the cash register rings? Do you view a sale as the start of the relationship, or the end? Do you exert as much effort to keep customers as you do to acquire them?

Sometimes, the most effective marketing and selling efforts take place after the first transaction.

Abstract:
Policy circles have long made the assumption that information and communications technologies promote human development. In mapping the Human Development Index (HDI) against the Digital Access Index (DAI) we explore the statistical and spatial relationship between human development and digital access. The results suggest information and communications technologies may not play as strong a role in promoting human development as is usually asserted and that public policies might need to be centered more on human rather than digital capital.