The Game-Changer for Enterprise Content Management

There's a term I don't hear mentioned in the ECM world very often, at least until last Tuesday that is. What am I talking about? User-experience. Chris Preston of EMC called it a "game-changer" at AIIM's info360 Conference last week.

Hooray! I wanted to pinch myself to make sure I wasn't dreaming when I heard the words. And, if I wasn't, I wanted to give him a standing ovation. A bit over-dramatic? Don't think so. If EMC had realized this five years ago, Sharepoint might not have won some of Documentum's marketshare, and if CenterStage had been ready,  vigilante corporate teams wouldn't be working with MarkLogic or clandestinely checking-out Box.

But what's past is past. The good news is that enterprise ECM vendors seem to be finally learning things from consumer-facing software designers; namely that that it's their customers' customers that they need to please. Sure, you sell to IT, but the end-users foot the bill for the product and, if they ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.

 

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey drove this point home in a talk he recently gave to his team at Square, the hot new payment processing company he now runs. Here's part of what he said:

I want to talk about how we build things here, a little bit about the product, the work we do and the work we need to do. So, this is something I put on our Wiki a long time ago, as one of our principles is to delight our users. But then I realized it’s more important to delight their users, which are their customers and payers. And the more we focus on that payer experience, the more we focus on really making that magical — and designing it. We win, our users win, and we get more users.

And a lot of people think of design, when they hear the word design as visual, something that looks pretty. Design is not just visual, design is efficiency. Design is making something simple. Design is epic. Design is making it easy for a user to get from point A to point B.

Engineering is design. Every engineer in this room, every operator in this room, every customer service agent in this room, is a designer. Because you’re designing constantly the interaction that you have with your tools or with your users or with your customers, and you’re trying to bring efficiency and take all the thinking out of that process.

So, everything we do here is design. We always want to make the beautiful (this goes on)

Now what Dorsey had to say applies not only to software designers but to systems integrators, consultants, and in-house engineers as well.

Preston seems to understand this. He told his audience that users need to be given access to applications on a device of their choice- be it a traditional desktop/laptop; a Blackberry, iOS, or Android phone; an iPad or another tablet computer. Workers are telling their employers that it's your responsibility to provide me with a way to hook up through my iPad,

"Give people access on the product they want, it will encourage adoption," said Preston.

Why should companies and IT departments do this? Adoption increases the amount of information available for decision making and this is especially important in today's business environment when many business leaders liken data to gold.

Comments

[Chris_p_walker]

The biggest issue I have with this article is that if the design is horrible, it won't matter what device it gets delivered on. A "sexy" device does not automatically equate to good application design or user experience.