All Contents © 2007 Burton Group. All rights reserved. Inertia and Innovation Moving forward safely Chris Howard VP and Service Director The Burton Group.

All Contents © 2007 Burton Group. All rights reserved.

Inertia and Innovation Moving forward safely

Chris Howard

VP and Service Director

The Burton [email protected]

www.burtongroup.com

The challenge.

Most unsuccessful computing systems have been relatively successful at the raw technical level but failed because of not dealing with breakdowns and not being designed appropriately for the context in which they were to be operated.

The most successful designs are not those that try to fully model the domain in which they operate, but those that are ‘in alignment’ with the fundamental structure of that domain, and that allow for modification and evolution to generate new structural coupling. As observers… we want to understand to the best of our ability just what the relevant domain of action is. This understanding guides our design and selection of structural changes, but need not (and in fact cannot) be embodied in the form of the mechanism.

Terry Winograd: Understanding Computers and Cognition (pp.84, 53)

2

Financial Services: Inertia

• Compliance• Merger/Acquisition Dynamic• Significant Technology Investment• Federated Development Teams• Security• Hardware/Software End of Life• Channel Consistency• Customer Sophistication• Process Automation• Network Limitations• Attrition on the Front Line• Training

3

4

User Experience

AgilityDemands

Abstraction

Requires

Convergence Facilitates

User Experience 5

(…to the same person at the same time)

Hacked my router

IMs, emails and talks on the phone...

Huge media consumerNeeds little instruction

Fearless

Kate, age 13Discards quickly

User Experience 6

Earl, age 70 1. When you say

‘phishing’ he thinks you mean it

2. Mistrusts the computer3. Only uses the branch…3.1. …but is starting to explore the internet and…3.2 …will eventually find hisBank.com

User Experience 7

User Experience 8

User Experience 9

User Experience: Expectations

• Multiple channels, same data. • Various form factors, maybe in combination• No impedance among channels• User creates their experience

• Rich & Adaptive interfaces• Maps to skill level• Easy to use, but powerful• Componentized vs. Structured information

• Control• User has freedom within specified domain

• Overlapping multitasking• What is attention?

10

User Experience: Expectations 11

http://www.snre.umich.edu/eplab/demos/st0/stroop_program/stroopgraphicnonshockwave.gif

High multitaskers perform # 2 very easily. They are great at

suppressing information.

1. Say the color represented by the word.

2. Say the color represented by the font color.

What is attention? (Stroop test example)

Acknowledgements: Cliff Nass, CHIME lab, Stanford

User Experience demands Agility

Inconsistency is part of flexibility, of nature’s strategy of keeping options open. Animals that cannot adapt to new environments will not survive the incessant fluctuations of climate. Consistency and rationality are human virtues in dealing with certain potentially orderly situations; we make excellent use of them in engineering and legal systems, but we shouldn’t expect living systems to have made them centerpiece of their operation in a changing, unpredictable world.

William H Calvin: The Cerebral Symphony, (p. 313)

12

13

“The combination of fast and slow components makes the system resilient, along with

the way the differently paced parts affect each other... All durable dynamic systems

have this sort of structure; it is what makes them

adaptable and robust.”

Fashion & art scream“Try this! No, no, try

this!”Novelty, trends,

experimentation for its own sake

Commerce absorbs and exploits the pace of fashion

and art, creates work and wealthGovernance is empowered

to take on the cost and disruption of creating

infrastructure

Infrastructure supports commerce and art & fashion.

Its long-term payback isn’t justified in strictly commercial

terms

Varying rates of change = sustainable adaptation

Agility: Rates of Change

Source: Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility

Fast

Slow

Achieving Agility

• SOA• Style of development

• Composite applications built from orchestrated services• Safety in interfaces

• Driven from the business domain• Business processes factor into services• Asset reuse (business and technical)

• Logic is federated• So who owns what?• Who is responsible for change?

• Separation of Concerns• Isolating application “harmonics”

• Design boundaries relative to change• Increased declarative programming

• Separates “what” from “how”

14

Achieving Agility

• Virtualization• Runtime responsiveness

• Environment flexibility• Autonomic Computing

• SDLC Methodologies• Iterative development was a great idea

• But became weighed down with disembodied artifacts• Post-iterative methodologies

• Agile, Extreme Programming (xP), Test Driven Development (TDD), Essential Unified Process (eUP)

• Adoption in large enterprises increasing• Still require architecture and documentation

15

Agility requires Abstraction

Most technology goes through cycles of development and change in both internal and external complexity. Often, the very first device is simple, but crude.

As the device undergoes the early stages of development, its power and efficiency improve, but so does its complexity.

As the technology matures, however, simpler, more effective ways of doing things are developed, and the device becomes easier to use, although usually by becoming more complex inside.Donald Norman: The Invisible Computer (p. 171)

16

Abstraction (in application design) 17

Using Abstraction

• Best practices become frameworks and platforms• Standardize and commoditize• Avoid duplication• Better control and tuning

• Capture domain taxonomy• Canonical data models

• Innovation happens at higher levels• Because the innovator is not busy re-inventing• Easier to align with business goals• Detached from implementation specifics

• Models become first-class artifacts• Shared understanding and negotiation• Provide multiple viewpoints• Transformation into implementation is improving, but no “magic button” yet

18

Abstraction facilitates Convergence

Technology is something much larger than the tool itself. It refers to the system of rules and procedures prescribing how tools are made and used…

To have a technology…there should be some agreed-upon ways of doing things in a social group.

Kathy Schick, Nicholas Toth: Making Silent Stones Speak (p. 49)

19

Tool makers 20

Convergence is Happening

• SDLC methodologies and development tools• Domain-specific tools and declarative languages

• Right tool for right user• Artifacts interoperate• Better separation of concerns• More integrated SDLC

• IDE is a nexus of control• Integrated testing• Integrated modeling• Integrated enterprise standards

• Operational Topology Modeling• Constrains artifact deployment• Hooks to monitoring tools

• Logical and Physical traceability• Layers of stack inter-relate

• Problem in runtime maps to logical, maps to role and process

21

Why is any of this important?

• The need to be agile is not just about “keeping up”.• Better User Experience reinforces affinity

• Loyalty• Relationship growth (human and financial)• Brand perception

• Financial Institutions Transact Trust• The more virtual the methods of transaction, the more trust defines

the relationship• Even non-criminal disruptions are catastrophic to trust• Brittle architectures increase the risk of disruption

22

We believe good men more fully and more readily than others: this is true generally whatever the question is, and absolutely true where exact certainty is impossible and opinions are divided…It is not true…that the personal goodness revealed by the speaker contributes nothing to his power of persuasion; on the contrary, his character may almost be called the most effective means of persuasion he possesses.

Aristotle, Rhetoric

Resources

Burton Group ResearchApplication Platform Foundations

VantagePoint 2005-2006 SOA Reality Check

VantagePoint 2007-2008: Build for Today, Design for Tomorrow

IDEs: Swiss Army Knives for the Enterprise

Building the Business Case for Service Oriented Architecture Investment

Web Presentation Technologies

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) Infrastructure

Related ResourcesCalvin, William. The Cerebral Symphony. Bantam. 1990

Carroll, John (ed.). HCI Models, Theories and Frameworks. Morgan Kauffmann. 2003.

Norman, Donald. The Invisible Computer. MIT Press. 1998

Schick, Kathy and Nicholas Toth. Making Silent Stones Speak. Touchstone. 1993

Winograd, Terry. Understanding Computers and Cognition. Addison Wesley. 1986

23

Submit a business card and receive a complimentary

report.