Who You Calling A Jesse?

January first is upon us and after what was a hectic Christmas break I can sit down and reflect on the year that was 2007 and what might come technology wise for 2008. All this happened in my life:

• I became a Dad on January 19th
• finished my course load on my Msc
• changed jobs
• cities I visited outside of Ontario: Las Vegas, London, Cambridge, Oxford, Leeds, Harrogate, York, Liverpool, Wigan, Deddington, Buffalo, Quebec City, Montreal
• Drove 30 000 km (or so) and I live 2 km from work
• instigated 4 BarCampWaterloo’s and one StartupCampWaterloo meeting a load of really interesting people at all of them

…and that is what I remember. Last year I set some goals for myself and had a few comments on technology. If I wouldn’t have changed jobs all those could have been met (I think) but I didn’t foresee that I have an opportunity to work with an extremely talented team on an impossible project with technology I hadn’t ever worked with. That fuels my excitement for 2008.

For this year my goals are just as simple as last year:

• Finish my msc (I have to by April)
• Focus on user experience and UI development
• Spend every moment possible with my son

As far as web technology goes. I thought last year that Spry sucked and AJAX might be more accessible by year end. I think as the year went on Spry got better and folks like Derek figured out some best practices for more accessible AJAX experiences.

This year I think the big technology fight will be between Flash and Silverlight. Microsoft has to figure out how to convince Flash developers why they should forget all they have learned and change technology while Adobe needs to figure out how not to step in it and be seen as an arrogant company that doesn’t deserve the loyalty Macromedia had built. The buzz and reaction over the whole user tracking thing or updates is going to piss people off. How dare customers get upset? Indeed.

Microsoft’s UI with Silverlight trump card might be Sharepoint. This beast of a CMS is (I think) the most extensive and customizable business class CMS out there. It is the best of a really bad bunch and Silverlight could make it suck less from a UI perspective. We shall see.

Should be an interesting year ;)

Ever had a bit of technology your use dictated to you by an IT department? Does it not even come close to meeting your expectations or requirements? Is it usually web based technology that is letting you down? This type of problem stems from what I call a ‘square peg, round hole’ philosophy in IT – when decisions of what technology to deploy is based solely on the ability to provide support, not the requirements of the project and/or an analysis of features required by the user. It seems to happen far more often with web based technology.

In a conversation with a colleague over a beer I tried to understand why this happens. Sadly I still don’t understand why, but I do better appreciate the position of people that decide to hammer that square peg in. But I think it because they don’t understand or have an actual use for the web themselves (that is a totally different post).

I believe this happens in every IT department and it stems from the environment. IT finds itself in a situation with limited resources to hire new staff even though they are tracking time on/and tasks and there is an expectation that IT needs to support everyone regardless of expertise. There is a project or group or department that has decided to use a particular technology. Reality kicks in and the service end has to learn to support the technology so a decision is made to apply that same technology to others that have similar but not the same requirements as that project group.

What happens next is ugly. The clients expect something that usually different because they may want the same features but they would apply a different priority to the features they use/need. This influences their expectations on the total experience. Take a content management system (CMS) for example. One group might put a high priority on workflow management, another on user management, another wants a templating scheme, another wants a forum, and another group really wants a wiki. A CMS can do all these things but I can’t think of a CMS that can do them all as well or anywhere near as good as specialized software.

However, CMS vendors will promise support and the ability to meet the demands of the user. This pulls on the support strings of IT. Rarely, if ever, will you find a CMS that delivers to a diverse groups expectations. What happens is that any number of groups become disenfranchised with the software and the overall project of deploying that technology is doomed to failure or mediocre success at best. The CMS vendor comes off either not being paid and/or looking really bad. The IT department comes off looking unprofessional at best which puts pressure on them to produce, and the cycle continues.

What should happen is that the IT department assesses the features as well as the priorities. They evaluate the technology providers based on that clear idea of what are ‘deal killer’ features for people. If it reaches a thresh hold that makes it impossible to please even 70-80% of the clients then IT needs to break down the technologies and groups not force them all onto one.

The web offers the opportunity for this to be easy. Web services, web sites as your API, universal log ins, etc. all make it possible to integrate different solutions on the data level. Sadly I think IT still approaches web apps as black boxes that work in silos.

The moral of the story for anyone building a web based service is that to really be a hit with medium to larger organizations you need to offer integration and openness in your apps. If you can be the folks that develop the integration tools as well as offer your product you can likely charge more based on a successful track record. At least from where I am sitting ;)

My role at work has me looking at a UI for a fairly complex application (known as jobmine) that has three distinct audiences with three distinct reasons for using the web app. The web application is the primary business tool for the co-operative education process at the University of Waterloo. This process sees anywhere from 10-25K people using it at least a couple times every four months. Staff in the CECS department use it for their day-to-day activities.

What is a co-op system? My definition is based on being a student and now an alumni, it is no way the ‘official’ take. Co-operative education is an approach to education that gives students a chance to learn outside of the classroom (and in the case of UW, make some good money) and gain experience in the ‘real world.’ If you are a student you look for and apply to jobs, manage your resume/CV, and find out about interview times and locations, accept and decline job offers. For an employer you post jobs, sort through applications, arrange interviews, and offer jobs. For staff you make sure this all works by supporting both students and employers, generating reports, manage a massive amount of data. Generally speaking.

It would seem easy enough if you walked up to it from a user perspective. You have your role, an idea of what needs to get done, and off you go. The expectations aren’t a whole lot different than say Workopolis or Monster.com.

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