Note: for those who do not use the Guardian App, the following is almost certainly far to detailed to be interesting (I’ll try for broader appeal with my next post), but if you do use it I would really welcome your feedback on my thoughts.
Summary: solid effort, but needs more flair, insight and commitment. It seems ironic to be criticising the Guardian App for not delivering the exact qualities that Guardian journalists deliver every day: flair, insight and commitment. The problem isn’t the content, and first contact a couple of months ago was very promising, but there are serious issues which simply haven’t been addressed. I bought a subscription to the Guardian via the App last night. But I did it with my head, not my heart. I often talk about the difference between, say, an Android tablet (“functional, can do everything you would want to do, a logical choice”) and an iPad (“beautiful, just does what you want, an emotional choice”). Right now, the Guardian iPad app is in the former category. Here is my critique of where it needs improvement. Hopefully they will address these issues as I would like the App to become a central part of my life, just as the Guardian is my newspaper, so I don’t decide to cancel the App in frustration in a couple of months time because I am not using it enough and prefer the web site (or go back to just buying the paper on Friday and Saturday, as I do not have the time to do justice to it more often). In a blog post last year, expressing his love for his Kindle, Ben Goldacre expressed beautifully the key need that is not delivered by this App: “that one feature – a dynamic personal archive of interesting bits – is AMAZINGLY, ludicrously, and spectacularly helpful: just one more step on the path of outsourcing parts of my personal autobiographical memory to devices so that I can get more done” (http://bit.ly/xoQZWG). What the Guardian App does well is to take the newspaper and make it available to someone who unwrapped a new iPad for Christmas. These users don’t have an expectation of what an exceptional iPad App should be and accept the limitations of the medium, rather than challenging them. What it does not do well is respond well to the need of experienced, committed iPad users who feel that their device is an extension to themselves. I am sure the implementors know how to design an exceptional iPad App, but I am not sure that the people controlling user experience decisions are allowing them to do so. Good design is all about understanding and delivering on use cases, and there are key use cases that the App fails to deliver sufficiently. First, addressing a problem the paper does not have – offline use. Second, addressing deficiencies compared to the paper – “tear out and keep” (which is also addressed much better by the web site today). Third, addressing usability compared to other iPad apps. And finally, really exploiting the medium. 1. Offline use. The is the primary reason (today) why an iPad user would buy the App instead of using the web site. But, basically, all you can do in offline mode is read. The only tool for anything else is copy/paste. How do you mark an article to come back to later to read or reread something in a calmer situation? How do You copy a link to come back and follow it when online? Why can’t you share and article and have it tweeted, or whatever, when next online? You can’t even email a link to an article when offline, even though there is no logical reason to need to be online to do so. 2. Tear out and keep. There are several use cases that involve ripping something out of a physical paper: to remind you to do something or to follow up on something later; to show to someone; to read later when you have time; to keep an archive of useful, interesting or entertaining content; etc. Improved copy/paste and Instapaper integration have somewhat addressed these, but not adequately – e.g. only Instapaper is offered, while all my web clippings are in Evernote, and I would also like to bookmark articles and links in Delicious. Both more options to integrate and a generic ability to copy a link to the current article (and copy a link in the current article) are needed – as well as an “Open in Safari” option. Select/Copy/Paste should provide a Select All option, and work for all content (the most important thing missing is photographs – for years I have kept scrapbooks of the best of Guardian photography), but there are also issues selecting some sub-headings which force you to select some text and then expand it to include the heading – and it seems particularly abstruse that you cannot Select in the copyright notice! And why can’t I save a picture, when I can open a link to the web site and save the picture from there? 3. Usability. For me the main issue here is navigation. The Sections/Articles structure is great, but there needs to be a better correlation between the layout of the headline pages and the order of the articles when you page through them – otherwise it is very hard to find your way back to content, and to quickly page through what you want to read (e.g. how do I read all the classical music reviews on a Friday? Or the non-fiction reviews on Saturday? How do I page through the letters to see if mine was published?) I like the idea of serendipity by mixing things up, but as everyone is not interested in everything, in practice it often causes irritation. The most brilliant example being the appearance of the Answers in middle of a series of Quiz Questions (24/12)! Aside from that, when the App has been suspended, why does it always restart on the Issues page – I nearly always want to carry on reading from where I was (the only logical exception is after a new issue has been downloaded). It would be nice to have the Guardian as an App on my home page (but I guess that is a Newsstand restriction). Finally for navigation, there should be some sort of Search across the issues downloaded (and ability to launch a search on the web site). With respect to the actual content, some additional links clearly need to be added for the mobile version – e.g. an article late last year on favourite pubs did not have a link to where they are or to their web site, and the list of top 10 bestsellers in on the Guardian bookstore which did not have a link to buy them! I also find the app a little slow to respond (especially startup – remember mobile App users are in to instant gratification) – but maybe I need to upgrade to an iPad 2. 4. Exploiting the medium. We live in a Mobile, Social, Cloud enabled world. Why is the Comment is Free world isolated from the Mobile App world? Why can’t I access related comments from the context of the article in the App. And contribute to them? Even when offline? I understand why the Paper and the Web have to be different in this respect, but the Mobile App provides a unique opportunity to bridge them – and take the next step forward in defining what a “newspaper” will be in the future. I tried not to get into solutions above – I believe it is better to identify issues and let smarter people come up with solutions, but as the key is intuitively addressing use cases without the user having to think about how to accomplish them, some solutions are obvious. Taking the first three issue areas above (the fourth is a larger question), here are some thoughts: 1. Offline: The action button should always be available. It should always offer to “Mark Article” for reference later, and there should be a selection alongside Issues/Sections/Settings for “Marks” which displays the list (in some form) and lets you go to one of them (ideally “Mark” should then change to “Clear Mark” and articles with Marks should only be deleted after a second, longer period of time – at which point the Mark goes too, maybe with a warning on startup for a couple of days). The Action button should also offer “Copy Link” (if there is an online equivalent article), and you should be able to Share an article via email, even when offline (and ideally via Tweet, Facebook, Instapaper too, with the action happening when next online). 2. Tear out: “Copy a link” to this article and “Open In Safari” (if it is also on the web) are essential (I can do it by emailing a link, then copying the link from the email and discarding it, but why are you making my life so hard) and also Copy a link in the article (and Open in Safari instead of, or from, the embedded browser?) Also Select/Copy/Paste should work anywhere in the article and should copy everything, including images – which should also offer “Save Image” (just like you can when you view the article in the browser). Ideally I’d like support for Evernote (web clippings), Delicious (bookmarks) and LinkedIn (sharing) – the first preferably working offline with the Evernote app (otherwise offering deferred clipping, alongside deferred bookmarking/sharing) – plus an ability to “Save To” any App on the iPad able to store HTML content. All of this in addition to the Mark proposal above, for coming back to things later. 3. Usability: the physical paper is grouped into sections for a reason, and when you page through the articles (not via the index) on the iPad, the same logic applies (e.g. on Fridays group the film reviews, pop reviews, classical reviews, jazz/world music; or on Saturdays, the non-fiction books, fiction books, children’s books, …) While the Section Headline Pages can aggregate a set of articles onto one (e.g. “Letters and emails” or “Reviews: Film”) when I click on the section and page through, I should get all of the articles in that section, in sequence. It would be easy to navigate directly to the group of articles that I want – as would ordering the pages in roughly the same order as on the HeadlinesnIndex page, rather that completely differently. Whenever I start the App, I should be able to go back to the article I was reading – except at the start of day when it can show the new issue, and if there is an updated version of the issue when it can offer to download it instead of entering the version I was reading. Finally, there needs to be provide more links to content, a Search capability, and improved performance (especially startup and perhaps opening articles). A couple of things that don’t fit into the categories above would be: adding the Weekend Magazine (magazine’s work brilliantly on the iPad); the crosswords/sodukos (I would be happy to buy an additional app); The Guide (especially the “What’s On” information – and why not leverage your data); and can we please have a free subscription to the iPhone App with the iPad App (as many of us have both devices). To quote Jonathan Ives “It’s very easy to be different, but very difficult to be better”. I believe the Guardian was trying to be different to other iPad Newspaper Apps and achieved a lot in the process. But I am not sure it has managed to be better. The modern Web 2.0, Mobile, Social world has evolved a model of trying something innovative, getting it into users’ hands, listening to feedback, and rapidly evolving and improving it. I was very impressed when I first saw the Guardian App, but have not been so impressed by its subsequent lack of rapid improvement. I hope this changes. The Guardian prides itself on being different – and also better. I would like to see it’s App do the same.Category Archives: Uncategorized
Evolution of the Social Business
Business Computing World kindly published my piece on the Evolution of the Social Business on December 23th, just in time for Christmas!
Facebook as a Digital Channel (and the Future of the Web)
I was just reading Andy Piper’s excellent post on the suitability of Facebook as a B2B marketing channel Is Facebook really useful for B2B? I posted my thoughts as a comment over there:
I’ve talked a lot (more in presentations than on the web – must fix that) about Facebook as a channel to consumers. It seems to me after reading your piece that there probably is still a role in B2B marketing around the ephemeral engagement you mention, because Facebook as a channel is fundamentally a way of reaching individuals (in a personal context) not businesses (or people as an employee). I guess Facebook could try to change that in the future, but right now they are focussed on the individual.Of course, you could say the same of billboards at airports, and they are full of B2B marketing (including IBM’s Smarter Planet). Whereas billboards at bus stops are generally consumer focussed. So I can see a role for B2B brands on Facebook getting generic, brand building messages out – and maybe also engaging with individuals to understand their personal opinions of a brand (which is going to influence their business decisions) rather than a traditional marketing channel supporting sales. More for Social Marketing by a Social Business.
With the 20th Anniversary of the Web falling this week, there has been quite a lot of discussion around what the web might look like in another 20 years. I can imagine many different possibilities, but how about this for a possibility… One service provider becomes the single landing point for individuals using the web. OK, not an original thought – that was what Yahoo! was set up to do, during the era of search it seemed like Google was everybody’s home page (and the future of bookmarks seemed dated as it was easier to just search for what you wanted) and now Facebook seems to be on a similar path to Net domination. It was an interesting journey, that sort of mirrors what we have seen with Knowledge Management in the enterprise. First it was all about Taxonomies. Then it was all about better enterprise search. And now it is about using social connections to discover knowledge. But I digress. Let’s assume for a moment the "next great thing" doesn’t come along, and Facebook adapts to the evolving needs of its customer and so continues to grow, until eventually everyone on earth has a Facebook account where they live their online lives. Not just their landing page, but the bulk of their web experience – as it is all linked to their social circles. What would that mean? Well, it could mean that corporate web sites become irrelevant. If users live their online lives in their social world, then to get their attention all B2C retailers will need a presence in that world. Facebook becomes the intermediary for commerce. Of course, to do that they don’t only need to replace corporate B2C web sites, they also need to replace Amazon and they need to convince news organisations, music vendors and many others to use them as the most effective way to reach consumers. Quite a challenge. But groups like the music industry definitely need help in creating a new channel to consumers. I wonder if Facebook is smart enough to give them a compelling solution in the way Apple did – and then leverage their engagement with users to make it even more effective. At the same time as carving a role for itself in the future of news organisations. Not to mention television at it moves online. And the delicate role they would need to fill as intermediaries between governments and their citizens. Far fetched? Probably – and there are many alternative visions for the future of the web. But an interesting thought experiment – and I expect there are some bright people in Facebook trying to think through what would be necessary to make it succeed.Invisible Technology … and Choosing a Mobile Phone
I haven’t done an iPad post for a while, but was just prompted to by a great CNET article: http://cnet.co/qmBiSC
It prompted me to write on my IBM internal activity stream: I don’t "use the iPad" in the way I "use my laptop". Instead I read the Guardian, check what’s happening with my friends (Facebook) or in IT (Twitter), or find out what’s going on in the world of IBM Collaboration (via blogs through the feed reader). Like all great technology it doesn’t get in the way or require me to think about it. It is invisible, I just see the content That’s what Apple does exceptionally well. It doesn’t think about building a better mobile operating system, or creating a Tablet to compete with someone else, it thinks about what users want to do, and how to facilitate letting them do it without getting in the way. It does feel (most of the time) as if all the irritations around the closed platform and managed ecosystem are there to allow others to contribute to that goal, without letting them undermine the user experience (yes, sure it’s about making money too, but ultimately you are going to make more money if you create a solution that flies off the shelves, rather than by controlling it). I’m still struggling with whether to get an iPhone or an Android to replace my BlackBerry. In some way, there doesn’t seem to be much of a gap that needs filling around the MacBook Air and iPad – all I really need is something that will let me make calls, show my electronic boarding pass and take pictures, check Twitter/Facebook and find my way home if I get lost, when I am out in the evening with only the things in my pocket. And I can do all those things, even on a BlackBerry (in face, much as it frustrates me, I would not be very motivated to do anything if the trackball wasn’t giving up). But… I am sure that isn’t really true. I know there will be different apps that really work well on the mobile and enrich my experience. But the thing is, iPhone users I know tell me about the great Apps they use, while Android users tell me how great the operating system is. Apple markets the way it will change my life, while Android markets the fact that it does Flash. So will an Android mobile phone be invisible the way I want it to be?Getting People to Behave Socially at Work
Picking up from the thread of my last post on e-mail reduction, I presented at the Dachis Social Business Summit recently, and for the event put this slide together to illustrate the final thought in that blog post:
The Tale of the Social Brand
On 11th April I had the pleasure of presenting as part of a panel on Business and Social Media for the BCS Young Persons Group. The evening was kicked off by Jemima Gibbons telling a wonderful story about use of social media by businesses, prompting Joanne Jacobs (if I recall correctly) to comment “you should put that on YouTube!” Well she has:
Although I do not think Jemima used the phrase (John Machtynger and I did that quite enough!), I think this is a great articulation of what it means to be a Social Business. The sort of engagement with your customers she is talking about is exactly what a social business should be striving to achieve. Those are the businesses that will generate loyal customers who will pay a premium for their products. Those are the businesses that will detect customer satisfaction problems and shifts in the buying behaviour in their market before the res.
Which was the one of the themes of Joanne got passionate about at the same event (she blogged some of the content after the event). Sure, you can have a social media strategy run purely by marketing that creates blogs and twitter posts. But that is not a social business. You must be authentic to get the value of being a social business – which means exposing the experience, abilities, skills, indeed personality of your staff to your customers through social channels.
This is exactly what has been articulated in IBM’s Social Computing Guidelines for some years:
… discourse through social computing can empower IBMers as global professionals, innovators and citizens. These individual interactions represent a new model: not mass communications, but masses of communicators. Through these interactions, IBM’s greatest asset–the expertise of its employees–can be shared with clients, shareholders, and the communities in which it operates.
Therefore, it is very much in IBM’s interest—and, we believe, in each IBMer’s own—to be aware of and participate in this sphere of information, interaction and idea exchange … to learn … to contribute.
So thanks to Jemima, Joanne and Jon, as well as the other talented co-panelists, LJ Rich and the always amazing Sue Black, for an entertaining and thought provoking evening, to the BCS members present (some young, some not so young) for their intelligent questions, and especially to Itua for organising the event.
And shame on all those companies who do not understand social business, and so are not actively encouraging their employees to come along to events like this, and to build their social networks online and offline. If Philip Clarke, the CEO of Tesco, gets it, shouldn’t you be paying attention? And Jemima’s video is a great place to start.Social Media and Information Overload
I am about to embark on the next iteration of my e-mail reduction challenge, and in the process I’ve been thinking a bit more about the problem of information overload.
In particular, the objection that Switching to Social Media is not a solution to information overload – it just moves the problem somewhere else. After all, if I get 200 e-mails a day to read, and those become a mix of 200 instant messages (that pop up on my screen to interrupt me), blog posts (that I feel obliged to read in my RSS reader) and community/activity updates (that I am notified about via a link in my email) … they are still the same 200 things being brought to my attention, and just as distracting as ever. But now they are in multiple different places that I have to check, and which have separate tools for filing and managing them (if any) and, even worse, which I can no longer handle when I am offline – thus reducing the amount of time I have to work on them. What is worse, the very nature of these tools means I can easily turn 200 messages into 2,000 if I start following to all the blogs and communities I am interested in, the micro-blogs of my expanding network, etc. The hope is that IBM Project Vulcan will address this one day by creating a new, single universal inbox that can contain all of those things, and let you respond to them and manage them in the same tool – just like an, err, e-mail inbox! The challenge here is not moving the messages, but solving the "attention management" problem by changing when things are shown to us. Managing all of these interactions as conversations instead of as individual interruptions can help, as would a way for the system to separate messages the user "must act on urgently" from those they "must act on sometime," from those they "should act on if possible," from those that are "nice to have". But ultimately, we are only going so solve this information overload problem if we reduce the number of messages/notifications that are sent. Ironically, I am the one person who cannot directly control that (although Luis Suarez has shown how much impact a forceful personality can have in changing the behaviour of others). The Connections 3.0 e-mail notification digests will help a bit, since they batch up many unimportant notifications to avoid each one causing a separate interruption (and groups notifications about a whole conversation thread into one message). But we need more than that. I am hoping, some day, to be able to tell the system that "I am working on Project X now" and have my Sametime Status change ("Concentrating on Project X – if you have something non urgent to discuss on another topic, please write on my Board or send e-mai/voicemail") and the messages I see from all my communications channel start to be filtered so I only see stuff to do with Project X (or stuff that is considered Urgent under some other rules can manage). I think many users need help by having things hidden from me if I really don’t care about them right now. At least everyone who says they suffer from information overload (not that I would say that – I love information, the more the better, it is fascinating stuff – but I do need help in effectively managing it all!) Which brings me back to e-mail reduction, My first theory was that wherever possible the system should hide stuff that doesn’t need to be handled immediately (by putting it in a folder). For e-mail, that’s probably a "To Read" folder – or set of folders graded by importance. I’ve thought quite a but about how to structure those. Simplicity is best, so Important and Not Important could be enough. On the other hand, the sheer volume of message can be overwhelming, so there may be more of an incentive to go an look at messages on specific subjects. In the end, I decided on a maximum of 10 topic areas, ordered in decreasing importance, for a mini pilot. During which I learnt, once again, that I never actually go and read anything that gets put away like that! I also had a minor technical hitch with my original approach of setting QuickRules to automatically file any message I did not need to see immediately into a folder for later. When I got to 60-odd QuickRules I started getting an error message. I am not sure if creating one rule per folder with more conditions in it will solve this – that is something I need to experiment with. This experience led me to wonder if auto-filing is the right answer. I tried the same thing years ago by routing all public newsletters to my Gmail account – which is now unusable because of the number of messages that flood into it. The theory was that there was no way I could ever read them all, but at least I could dip in if I wanted to see the most recent, and search them all for a topic I needed to know about. But I never did any of those things. It’s a bit like the problem I have with To Do lists – I am great at putting things on the list but useless at checking them off. I started to reread Getting Things Done recently in the hope I could come up with a better strategy for handling my to do lists (because the iPad has made it much easier to create lists, so I needed to be better at using them!) But finishing reading the book is now on a to do list somewhere 🙂 Conclusion: yes, all this rambling actually had a point! Or rather two:- Everyone isn’t the same. Some people love managing to a zero inbox, while other’s prefer a less structured approach (and I have a suspicion that the latter, less disciplined types are more in need of social collaboration). Some people like to allocate time slots for everything, while others work better when interrupt driven. As Dave Allen points out, there is no one magic system that works for everyone – each user has to find a trusted process that works for them.
- If Social Media is the answer, it can only be because it enables us to take a radically different approach to information sharing. We need to convince everyone that the social platform will let people to find information they need when they need it, as long as it has been shared at some point. Then I no longer need to e-mail you some information that you might needs in six weeks time – I can just share it generally and be confident that you will find it if/when you need it. Only by changing this behaviour, in the people sending the messages, can we ever hope to reduce message volumes and so information overload.
There is an interesting challenge here around building trust in the social platform. We, as users, need to be confident that if we share something, it will remain available to us (and to others). This includes high enough space quotas that we are not forced to delete stuff we would rather keep sharing. Otherwise we are going to want to keep a local copy as well as a server copy, and this increases the effort required and reduces the likelihood that we will share things.
What is needed is to enable a cultural shift to information on demand when we need it, instead of information pushed when it is created.iPads at Lotusphere
Supporting evidence for my Lotusphere iPad thoughts from Twitter: “@stuartmcintyre: Just been told that the were 1600 iPads on the wifi at the #ls11 OGS. That is approx. 1 in 5 of the attendees – staggering!”
I spent some time in the Innovation lab and this morning found myself repeatedly seeing things that would help me to work on the road with the iPad and no laptop.
Then I was discussing with Collin Murray my impressions of the week, summed up as: Social Business + Mobile + Cloud are all disruptive and highly complementary.
“Timing is Everything” and the time is right for dramatic changes in our industry. The iPad finally convince me that maybe it is time to buy a MacBook as a cross-over personal/business device. This week made me wonder if I need a new laptop at all.
The Impact of Mobility
As I wander round Lotusphere 2011 I have come to the conclusion that there might be more iPads at the conference than laptops. Maybe not if you count the ones back in the hotel rooms, but certainly in the meeting rooms and open areas. OK, there are probably still more BlackBerry devices being carried, but the iPads win in terms of usage time.I find it really amazing how many there are. Quite a revolution in one year. I understand that 15 million iPads were sold in 2010, and have seen a forecast of 45M for 2011.This has reinforced my belief that people will stop carrying laptops sooner than many think. One colleague left his ThinkPad back in the UK. I am leaving mine in the room “just in case” I need access to something there. As I shift more and more content from local Notes databases to online Connections social content that concern will go away (helped by IBM giving me online access to my whole mail file via iNotes as well as local access to a subset synched to the device).I believe this will accelerate rapidly as Android extends the market down to users who cannot afford a premium Apple experience. I am starting to hear customers here talk about their future being a “bring your own device” strategy, which is also IBM’s approach, to increase flexibility and reduce costs.What many companies are starting to realise is that such employee flexibility (with appropriate usage guidance) can save them a lot of money, help their employees with work/life balance and make the organisations more agile and faster moving by improving employee reachability.I believe there is a strong feedback loop between social software (which is more compelling if it is always at your fingertips), mobile devices (which are easier to adopt if you can connect them to public Internet services) and Cloud based collaboration (which makes it easier for enterprises to adopt new services as they do not need to go through the deployment phase).This virtuous circle will accelerate adoption of Social Business in a way few are expecting. The combination of user owned devices, cloud based services and communities of users collaborating easily across all parts of the organisation to deliver business value, means that IT are going to have to embrace these technologies and use them to deliver an exceptional work experience to their users. Otherwise they risk becoming irrelevant to the business from a collaboration perspective as use of both e-mail and Windows PCs dies away and the users start using mobile devices and Cloud based social services to collaborate instead.Hard to believe? Well think back 3 years. How did you keep in touch with old University friends and the folks you met at the gym? Email, right? So how do you do it today? For most people (who don’t do email for a living) the answer is Facebook and Twitter.That transformation is coming to business to. So embrace it, or get out of the way before it steamrolls over you.
“Simplify, then add lightness”
I had the pleasure of listening to the awesome Jason Gary from IBM presenting on an internal conference call this afternoon, and he quoted Colin Chapman, the founder of Lotus (the car people, not the collaboration people):
"Simplify, then add lightness." That resulted in a microblog discussion on Joe Baxter’s Board with the equally awesome Luis Suarez on the topic, where I wrote: "Microblogging over blogging helps the simplification part. As does forwarding an e-mail and not including everyone on the original copy list "for completeness" – while adding a short precis of the key facts instead of expecting the recipient to read the whole thread adds lightness." We’ve been trying to adopt the Web 2.0 a philosophy of "simple" ever since we started on the social collaboration journey with Lotus Connections, but it is a constant battle because:- Every user wants their one, favourite feature added.
- Enterprise IT wants all the features of their existing, mature collaboration technologies carried over to the new one.
- Strategists want you to integrate with everything they already have to leverage their investments, while architects want the same to justify their previous choices.
- Marketing wants lots of new features to promote, in every new release.
- and Developers just love developing stuff!
As systems evolve, they inevitably get more complex. The challenge is to make them continue to appear simply to the users and to make deployment simple when the use case is simple.
At IBM we are often accused of over-engineering stuff. But fundamentally that is often because we build for deployment in enterprises with hundreds of thousands of users, data that is measured in petabytes and networks with millions (or billions) of endpoints. Apple shows how very complex technology can appear simple to the user. What interests me is how you lighten, so as to reduce maintenance costs and enhance evolution. Many years ago, I learnt as a participant in the Internet Engineering Task Force that it is easier to add new capabilities at the edge of a complex system – and hard to change the core. This principle of providing a generic core that supported innovation at the edge (when they designed the Internet no-one expected it to be used for Skype, YouTube and Facebook) helps to manage that complexity (and the ongoing story of IPv6 shows how hard to is to significantly change the core without impacting what is at the edge). This is the principle that the best development teams I have worked with try to adopt. Well architected, separable components built on well defined, open standards. Enable innovation at the edge, and minimise the size of the core. Manage complexity by layering architectures. Enable innovation by publishing all the interfaces (including all the ones you need internally, even if you do not know what external people are going to use them for). That way you can evolve complex organisms out of simple building blocks. Of course, that doesn’t make the final system simple – but if done well it should make complexity manageable. Albert Einstein said: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." Causing Joe to respond on his Board: Now THAT’S a great quote. Streamlining without "dumbing down". Perfect. The challenge is to figure out how simple it is possible to be, without either compromising its usefulness or compromising its ability to evolve at the edges to deliver even more value. I can’t really influence that. But I can start implementing simplification and lightening in the way I collaborate every day. This blog is a good example of the principle. The original microblog provided a simple discussion with some good sound bites for those who don’t want to dig into detail. But it can act as a "hook" to draw those that are interested into a blog post that investigates the topic in more detail. But I have to go now … I want to catch up on the discussion on Joe’s Board – and post a link back to this post for those who want to think about it a little deeper.
Collaboratively Speaking 