Been working in the Information Technology (IT) area for quite some time now.
No, I don’t do the ‘IT’ kind of IT. I am all about making IT relevant to people, its ‘users’ in some IT terms. I am all about their experience, how IT actually help them in their daily lives and their works, instead of IT being IT that radiates pride over how advanced they are.
I am about quality improvement for IT and their services, not about pure figures that look like numbers in the background of a ‘The Matrix’ scene. It is about what those numbers actually mean to people affected by them, by people who need to care about them.
By a chance encounter I was talking to someone at a café today and that topic came up again.
Working on a product that is great does not always translate to sales. It is only when consumers ‘understand’ the product that it takes off. I cited the whole disruptive innovation once exhibited by Blackberry (Research In Motion) and continued to be displayed by Nintendo nowadays to ‘click’ with their customers.
Blackberry once displayed how great their products are but being able to show the corporate and general users that security is important, so is the ease to use their devices to achieve such secured communications at work and in life. Blackberry OS is still very secure and, in my opinion quite user friendly. But Blackberry OS is no more in their once core business – mobile devices. That’s because it failed to click with customers. Apple displayed how easy it will be to use touch screen control and how life is made easier with a beautifully designed device. Google followed the suit with Android. Blackberry, while having a great OS with BB10, failed to convince customers and developers what it is about. Being too complicated to develop apps for put developers away, being lack of usable apps to make life easier when that had become the norm, failed to convince customers to come back. Mobile devices are no longer about security, but also feeling ‘modern’ and ‘usable’ with ‘choices’ seemingly available for customers, no matter that ‘choice’ is real or not. It’s about the self-gratifying perception.
Nintendo made waves with its consoles when the whole world wrote it down, with their DS handheld, their Wii and their Switch. Nintendo is not about cutting-edge technology, but about using matured technology that had become cheaper and use it in an innovative and relatable way. Touch control was an old thing when DS was launched but Nintendo showcased how old can be new again. Motion control was experimented for long before Wii but then Nintendo convince customers, young and old that even wonky motion controls can be fun. Merging handheld and TV consoles fulfilled a lot of people’s dreams of taking their favourite games on the road without compromising the experience.
What are the commonalities in these stories? One failed the other succeeded, are relatability and relevance.
After working in IT for a while, I still constantly amazed by the shear arrogance of technological pride some IT professionals exhibited. For them, when they have the newest, seemingly most advanced technologies, they are successful. They can perform any work without any fault. When things fell apart, people are not tech savvy enough to understand them. It is not their fault.
Being the bridge between the techies and the users, I always said to the techies, if I cannot understand how do you expect users understand?
Maybe I am a rare breed of people who understand technology, knowledge and user experience, and link them together, but when the techies are literally with their heads in the clouds, what future does it hold for the users and the organisations they work for as a whole?
I have asked different groups of techies many times – what are they here for? Are they just here to manage the infrastructure and offer state-of-the-art technologies as showcases? Or are they here to use technology to meet the business goals and strategic drives of the organisations they reside in? When you are in higher education, is it about teaching, research and reporting? Or it is about getting the newest fancy things in without thinking what they are for? When you are in healthcare, is it about just bringing the latest hardware in or is it about how technologies that can keep your patients in the ward safe? Or how technologies can foster clinical researches in a private yet progressive manner? When you perform maintenance, have you thought about how it would impact patients in the wards?
The fact that I still need to constantly ask people these questions sometimes is frustrating.
I cannot say I know it all, but if technology is not client centred, what is it for? Technology has no value when it does not improve people’s lives, especially when we rely so heavily on them. Yes, people will have to deal with mediocre technology and IT services, but is that the reason for IT departments to exist? They do their own stuff and serve up a lacklustre IT buffets that consumers have no choice but to accept and take what’s on offer, all the while paying for them? When we talk about service improvements and performance indices, are we just trying to tweak it to make us look good, thinking users will not catch anything because they do not understand how technologies work? When something went wrong, is it always users’ fault? Are we arrogant to a point that when we broke something during maintenance it is ok to ask doctors and nurses, who suffered the outage, to fix things themselves in the clinics and the wards by sending them a piece of instruction they cannot understand?
When I discussed about the new products of his company with this fellow coffee drinker at a café, those were the questions and thoughts that ran through my head today. We can pour millions of dollars on new advanced technological products, but when customers failed to understand them, or failed to relate to them, they are just hardware lying around. A blanket product without a focus and attempted to be a jack of all trade will go nowhere when no consumer group could see its relevance to their work and daily lives.
I haven’t felt that excited talking about technologies and its relationship with people for quite a while. Maybe that’s just who I am as a professional in the industry. Or maybe I am just weird.
But one thing for sure, if we don’t get our heads out of the clouds and be more grounded, IT professionals will still be seen as a bunch of techies who go around making empty promises and deliver business irrelevant solutions and services disguised as state-of-the-art products.
