[Sigia-l] "Standard" interfaces?

[Paula Thornton]

David wrote: "Users don't buy software at the
corporate level. IT staff do"

[When all you have is a hammer...]

David makes the assumption that I was speaking 
exclusively of 'purchased' software. I was not (while 
I did use examples of purchased software because 
that's the only thing that can be discussed from 
a 'common experience' perspective).

The preponderance of business productivity today is 
still predominantly driven from interaction with 
mainframe applications. There is a lot of 'scraping' 
going on to put an 'interaction layer' on top of 
existing technology (that admittedly is so entrenched 
in the business infrastructure that everything would 
come tumbling down if we attempted to extract it). 
Unfortunately, those responsible for building these 
interaction layers are by-and-large all still non-
interaction types (ala. programmers...what I refer to 
as "The Inmates Have Taken Over the Asylum"). And they 
are using what they believe to be 'best practice' to 
accomplish these goals...which is to reuse 
the 'standards' established by the likes of Microsoft.

Standards? I rely heavily on shift-delete and shift-
insert for cutting and pasting. Shift-delete, while 
supported in every other tool, is not supported in 
Visio.

The word we need here is conventions -- things that 
deliver a sense of 'sameness'. But those things are 
about 'operations' not about 'functions'. You want to 
talk standard metadata? Let's talk about standard 
naming for standard functions! Let's take a lead from 
the FDA...it has to fulfill certain standards before 
you can call it Mayonnaise, otherwise it's Salad 
Dressing (you either hate or love Miracle Whip and you 
definately don't want to be disappointed when you bite 
into the sandwich).

I've thrown vendors to the mat over this before. Tell 
me what functions you're bringing to the table, and 
then I'll tell you if I'm interested. Why? Because 
business 'diferentiation' is in the business rules. 
How I string functions together into processes is what 
makes my business unique from my competitors. Whenever 
I buy a business-critical solution (things like Word, 
Excel etc. are 'commodities' and don't fall into this 
category), I'm immediately putting myself at risk 
of 'sameness' and the possibility of losing 
competitive advantage...that's why, again, most large 
corporations build their own...

And, again, that's where our skills have the most 
potential long term.

Paula Thornton
Interaction Design Strategist
'...putting people and process before technology to deliver solutions'