What Do We Mean When We Talk about Enterprise 2.0 and Customer Experienced-Centered Design?
Web 2.0, a term coined by Darcy DiNucci in her 1999 article “Fragmented Future,” describes the then-nascent rumblings of an internet disconnected from screenfuls of text and graphics loaded into a browser into an interconnected transport mechanism where all sorts of interactivity takes place—on the computer screen, the television set, the car dashboard, the cell phone, the hand-held gaming device—basically anywhere. Since the term was coined a decade ago, Web 2.0 has emerged as a sort of connectivity paradigm based on social networking, information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration.
Web 2.0 revolution was slow to gain a foothold in the world of enterprise software, for enterprise software, after all, is based, traditionally, on a paradigm of centralization and control—the very paradigm Web 2.0 tears down in all its Wild West glory. As Web 2.0 emerged from the grand world wide web proving grounds as the standard-bearer for software development, in the enterprise space there emerged a dialectic of Hegelian proportions: a thesis of centralized, control-based enterprise software challenged by an antithesis of Web 2.0 decentralization and sharing. From the clash has emerged the synthesis we now call Enterprise 2.0.
Enterprise 2.0 applications—the next generation of enterprise software development—represent a great leap forward for the enterprise in terms of scalability, modularity, interoperability, user productivity, and enjoyment. But what makes an application an Enterprise 2.0 application? Here’s our take.
An Enterprise 2.0 application is 100% web-based. It has a properly-modeled object-oriented design and architecture, and is multi-tenant and multi-client. An Enterprise 2.0 app has easy, robust configurability, and a rich toolset associated with it that makes administration and management easy. An Enterprise 2.0 app is measurement-ready, because metering and analytics are built into its DNA. An Enterprise 2.0 app is role-based, secure, and offers a persona, private experience for each user. It’s compliant with modern integration standards, and has documented, re-usable APIs and web services that make third-party integration a snap.
In terms of design, an Enterprise 2.0 app is crafted to take advantage of all appropriate business channels, including—but not limited to—the web, the phone center, advisors, devices, and brick-and-mortar establishments. An Enterprise 2.0 app requires no training because it’s simply usable right out of the box. It has a flat, interactive information architecture that’s designed with a customer-centered focus for all types of people.
But what’s customer experienced-centered design? It’s customer-focused, of course, but it goes several steps further to consider the entire customer experience as a whole. It’s based on real-world user scenarios and goals, not a laundry list of features and functionality concocted in a board room or a focus group. Car owners, for example, love cup holders, so car manufacturers typically build cup holders into every nook and cranny of a car’s interior. But just because car owners love cup holders doesn’t mean they’re looking for cup holders in the trunk.
Customer experience-centered design meets business goals because the criteria for success, and the means to measure it, were determined up front, before anything was wireframed or coded. And that makes the CFO happy, because customer experienced-centered designs are feasible, supportable, and implementable. They delight customers because they predict which way the market is going, then deliver on market expectations in an elegantly simple way. They are intuitively usable because their engagement model is flat, fluid, and based on warm, two-way interactions between the interface and the user.
What does Enterprise 2.0 and customer experience-centered design mean for business? At Makibie, we’re excited to be on the bleeding edge of Enterprise 2.0 and customer experience-centered design because it allows us to deliver real business value up front—and quickly at that. After all, in an increasingly-crowded marketplace with little differentiation in service models, features, and functionality, applications that make doing business easier for enterprises and customers alike can lead to real competitive differentiators that can transform a company into a real market leader and innovator . . . not just another dog in the pack.
By Robert Pothier