Beneficiary-led action

I don’t particularly like e-mail, not because it is bad per se, but because we have made it into a one-size-fits-all collaboration and communication tool. I have particular dislikes for the misuse of the cc button and the very existence of the bcc button, something I have written about before.

Even those dislikes pale into insignificance when compared to my public enemy number one, the infinite-loop mail. This is where person A sends an e-mail, say, to eight people named B to I. B drops A and C from the conversation and adds J and K. C meantime adds J as well, but drops B and brings A back.

This seems to happen regularly in large institutions, and we create all kinds of horizontal bureaucracies as a result, looping endlessly.

Kishore Balakrishnan, commenting on an earlier post of mine, mused about implementing ticketing systems for e-mail in environments where everyone could see the size of the queue, open items, turnaround times, the lot. Others have tried paying for attention at the same time as dealing with spam, using techniques like Seriosity suggests.

Some of these issues came up in conversation today, and it reminded me of some principles I tripped over many decades ago.

The first was in a world before I had corporate e-mail, I’m talking about 1981. [Others may have had access to such things, but my first memory of using serious corporate e-mail was in 1986 at Data General as part of their Comprehensive Electronic Office (CEO) offering. While I had played with personal e-mail, I did not have a computer at home, so it mattered not.

So, in this world before e-mail, someone old and wise decided they’d teach me a bit about office politics and how to survive them. Things like: Don’t appear in announcements, they’re just like drawing large Xs on your back and saying “Kill me”. Try not to have an office, it confuses the daylights out of the plotters and schemers. Smoke (it was OK in those days).

When it came to interoffice memos (the pieces of paper you sent around in those bright orange envelopes with 20 address boxes and, occasionally, a string you had to tie round a circular tab thingie) the advice I was given was as follows:

1. Memos are always to be drafted by the recipient. She is the person who knows best what to put in the memo.

2. The recipient also chooses the sender of the memo. Again, she is best placed to decide.

3. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to convince the chosen sender to sign the said memo. This is usually done by offering to trade. In exchange for the signature, you offer to get him a memo (drafted by him, of course) and signed by the person he chooses.

Sound overly cynical? It’s not meant to be. Just observations about enterprise life.

Today, when I recalled this, some other thoughts came into my mind. A separate conversation, this time about EDI and Edifact and SITPRO, discussing the evolution of automation of trade documents. Again in 1981, another wise person said to me, as if we were in a murder mystery tale, “who stands to gain? Who benefits from the standardisation and automation? Find the beneficiary and you will have someone motivated to implement the application. For it to work, EDI must be beneficiary-led.”

Who benefits? Who stands to gain? These are questions we have to ask ourselves as designers. But actually we know the answer. It should always be “the customer”. So now we have to keep asking ourselves “How does the customer benefit from what I am doing?”.

As we get better at answering that question, we will build systems that are genuinely designed from the customer perspective.

Some like it hot

I love chillies, particularly when they are seriously hot; I’ve written about it before here and here. So it came as a pleasant surprise to me that my father’s day present was this:

Absolutely brilliant stuff. I made myself a sandwich this evening (we usually eat only one “cooked” meal a day, and fend for ourselves the rest of the time). Seeded bloomer, pastrami, some rocket, a dash or three of the habanero paste. Sensational. If you want to find out more, go to the  Chilli Factory or direct to the Turbo Supercharge Habanero Paste.

I call this ” a blog about information”. And yet it would appear that I write about all kinds of things besides information and its enabling technologies: food, music, books, humour, cricket, DRM and IPR, identity, it’s a long list. Why do I do that? Here’s why:

I think information per se is meaningless; to have value it must inform someone about something. So I write about things I am interested in, and look at ways that information about those things is created, how it is enriched and improved, how it flows. How people publish that information, how people subscribe to that information. What tools are available to read that information, to amend or update it, to delete it; to create it in the first place. What visualisation techniques are available. How to make all of this better.

Let’s take chillies for example. Many people know that chillies are hot. A smaller number may know that there is a unit of measure for this hotness, the Scoville Unit. But most people find it hard to really understand what a Scoville unit is.

But what if they had something like this?

You can find the original here. The entire Scoville Food Institute site, The Science of Heat, is worth visiting if, like me, you’re into this kind of stuff.

Great stuff. But it made me wonder. We use heatmaps for visualising all kinds of things…. but not hotness? I’m sure someone out there has created a heatmap for chillies.

We will learn more about information and its tools and techniques and technologies by using the tools, techniques and technologies to publish, and subscribe to, everyday information about everyday things. That is my fervent hope.

Hoggified

I blame David Weinberger. It was him. He made me do it. He made me follow his tweet and watch this video.  Joe Cocker, with subtitles for people who find his accent and delivery style hard to comprehend. Be careful. Be very careful. I hurt.

Time to bespeak up and defend the language

We live in interesting times.

Last week, it was reported that the Advertising Standards Authority had decreed that the word “bespoke” could now be used to describe suits that weren’t entirely handmade.

Moustache quivering in indignation, I went over to Wikipedia to see what it said about the word “bespoke”:

Bespoke is usually a British English term for tailored clothing made at a customer’s behest, and exactly to the customer’s specification. Bespoke clothing is created without use of a pre-existing pattern, differentiating it from made to measure, which alters a standard-sized pattern to fit the customer.

I’ve known a number of bespoke tailors over the years; one of them, Thomas Mahon, even has his own blog. I count him as a friend, so I thought I’d go and check him out, see if he had anything to say about the subject. And this is what I found:

A lot of people use the terms “bespoke” and “made-to-measure” interchangeably. They are mistaken.

‘Bespoke’ is actually a term which dates from the 17th century, when tailors held the full lengths of cloth in their premises.

When a customer chose a length of material, it was said to have “been spoken for”. Hence a tailor who makes your clothes individually, to your specific personal requirements, is called “bespoke”. This is unlike “made-to-measure”, which simply uses a basic, pre-existing template pattern, which is then adjusted to roughly your individual measurements.

What the ASA has done is in effect allowing the nice distinctions between phrases like “bespoke” and “made-to-measure” to disappear, and for no good reason. Language does evolve, and we need to be adaptable about it. But that does not mean we have to do stupid things with language. Allowing “made-to-measure” and “bespoke” to be used synonymously is inaccurate and unnecessary. It is the equivalent of allowing yogurt to be called vegetarian while containing beef gelatin. Strange world we live in.

Even more strange when you consider the other craftsmen that use the word “bespoke”. Software engineers. Ironic, isn’t it? People buy software they call “off-the-shelf”, then mangle it amazingly beyond recognition. This happens constantly in the ERP and SCM markets.

But they don’t dare call it bespoke. Because their CFO knows that “bespoke” is also a synonym for “expensive.” They might as well call the software bespoke, given the level of changes they tend to make, but they don’t.

One group of people who use patterns when they shouldn’t, and they want to call a suit bespoke when it isn’t.

Another group of people who don’t use patterns when they should, and they don’t want to call software bespoke when it is.

Go figure.

The Shaping of Things to Come

It’s been a long day, coming at the end of a long week, tiring yet ultimately very fulfilling. I wanted something to read, something very special and very specific. Whatever I chose, it needed to meet the following criteria:

  • escapist and lighthearted yet not superficial and empty of meaning
  • easy on the brain, not a taxing read, yet stimulating and challenging
  • physically in the form of a book yet in essence a web creation

So I thought for a while and decided to go with another read (probably my fourth) of Bruce Sterling’s Shaping Things, designed by Lorraine Wild.

I love the book, particularly the repeated theme that people and objects are deeply connected in successive technocultures. And I sat down to read it.

After a while I took a break, made myself a green tea and checked the web for messages. And then I thought to myself, it’s been a few years since the book’s been out, let me see what the reviews have been like.

And one of the places I went to was Amazon. Stuck somewhere deep down the page, I saw this:

It made me think, now that’s the shape of things to come.

You see, I’ve never liked the traditional direct marketing model, the idea of direct mail irks me. I cannot believe that people even consider operating models with such appallingly low hit rates. [In fact, in today’s day and age, I’m surprised that people don’t rise up and rebel at all the waste of paper and postage and time and attention involved in creating and strowing around the junk mail].

My irkedness dropped down a notch or two when Google came along; now, despite the fact that we’d somehow managed to pave the cowpaths, we’d migrated a crappy model, lock, stock and barrel into the new world, at least we’d done away with the waste of paper and ink and postage and the energy costs of physical delivery.

But I was still irked. I felt cheated that we lived with such abysmal click-through levels. Conversations about this with the inestimable Doc then led to my being taught the emergent basics of VRM “at the master’s feet”, as it were.

What do customers ultimately buy after viewing this item? 83% buy the item featured on this page.

That is, at least in part, what VRM is about. Letting customers review and recommend things and then connecting those reviews and recommendations to other customers who trust the reviewers and their recommendations. Making it easy for customers to share their intentions with others, to share their actions with others, to share their likes and their dislikes. Their way.

If we get VRM right, then 83% will be a low figure. Imagine the reduction of wastage that is implied in that statement.