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June 13, 2002
Code as Your First Impression
Jon Udell makes and interesting statement on his weblog:
Here's the best take-away from the talk. Now that we have largely replaced human touchpoints (sales clerks, travel agents, etc.) with software, it is the behavior of software, not human employees, that projects the corporate brand. So every business is now in the software business, and the quality of the software's behavior is a crucial success factor. Amen to that. However we get there, high-quality software behavior is a goal on which we can all agree.
This is an intriguing idea. There's a relatively famous case study (from Harvard, I think) about Sears during one of their turn arounds. As part of the changes they made, they made a concerted effort to change the attitude and vision of the sales clerks on the floor since that was the only interaction most customers had with the company. I know Wal-Mart makes significant efforts here as well (my Dad is a door greater!).
For many companies, the software comment is very true and not just for Amazon and eBay either. While citizens will certainly have many different interactions with the State of Utah, we touch thousands of them every day at www.utah.gov. The quality of that interaction is our brand.
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Digital Dashboards
Jon Robb talks about using RSS to build digital dashboards:
The concept is simple. In addition to getting new posts from news sites and other weblogs, RSS feeds can contain data from corporate systems. Sales data, financial data, supply data, data from partner systems, etc. Using this method, employees could get up to the minute data from multiple applications on a single webpage -- a personal digital dashboard.
I think this is a great concept, but I have a few thoughts:
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First, the idea of using RSS (or something like it--I might want more structure) for dashboards is great. I'd love to see constantly updated dashboards with all the relevant informaiton that a manager needs and, of course, this would be different for every manager. I once heard someone describe the perfect content of the dashboard as the answers to the 10 questions that manager asks every morning to do their job.
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Why wouldn't I just use a portal tool like the Novell portal product to aggregate the the data on a personalized basis for people. I'm all for experimentation and weblogs and all, but the fact is that in an enterprise you want things to be simple, straightforward, and not cause too many support calls. Having everyone use Radio just for the new aggregator wouldn't be a good move. Now, if there was a reason to have them all doing weblogs as well (and I'm sure that there are) then that's a different story. Still not sure I'd pick a desktop based product over a server based product though.
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To be useful for this purpose (and many others) I also want to be able to control more easily the layout of the news that gets aggregated. For example, I don't want the daily sales figures getting all mixed in with the NYT technology page list. I want is in a box in the upper left hand corner that turns RED when the figure is below target.
Still, I'm intrigued by the possible uses of RSS, etc. in the enterprise.