I really love stealing good ideas Competitive Analysis. What I don’t like is how literally people take that word “competitive”.
Remember this old (Internet time) adage:
Jakob’s Law of the Internet User Experience – Users spend most of their time on other sites.
Once you convince your project stakeholders that when you are building an website or application that competitors are not always direct competitors or even in the same vertical. You can sit down and go over the applications or sites that they enjoy using. I find that this gives me really valuable information into the design patterns that my client have in mind when they are envisioning the application that they want built.
Now it is hard enough to to convince people to indulge this activity normally, but when you are building an enterprise application and you are asking people to tell you why they like the Air Canada booking system it can become downright impossible to keep them engaged. The one exception to this is when you are designing an enterprise search and everyone just wants it to be “like Google”. (Don’t get me started on that right now :-), I will discuss that later)
When you are defining requirements for your next enterprise application bring in some of the eventual end users of the system and have them talk about the sites that they like with the project stakeholders. You’ll get some insightful information that you can use in your design, your stakeholders will hear the “voice of their customers“, and if you are lucky hopefully this will aide in the adoption of social software on the Enterprise.
This will become even more important as Web 2.0 patterns start to infiltrate the enterprise (Ã la Enterprise 2.0).
Dion Hinchcliffe talks elegantly about infiltration in his Enterprise 2.0: Ten Predictions for 2007.
5. Consumerization of the enterprise will continue apace and will help drive Enterprise 2.0 adoption at the grassroots level. If any of this Enterprise 2.0 trend is really starting to happen, it’s because it reflects a better way of working that users are already adopting en masse on the Web. For example, blogging reaches more people than an e-mail can, and often in unexpected, serendipitous ways. “Spaces” build out a low-barrier, cost-effective personal channel on the Internet that provides a well-defined way for a user to communicate with the rest of the world or organization. These models are becoming well-understood and effective on the Web and will drive bottom-up adoption in the enterprise, often being pushed by newer, younger workers who are comfortable and conversant with them. Also, I suspect no solution to the empty quarter will be found in 2007.
I just wanted to remind people that EnterpriseCamp Toronto is happening this weekend on January 13th.
We wanted to get the enterprise development community together in Toronto in a BarCamp style unconference.
This is going to be a different focus then regular BarCamp events. This event focuses on enterprise software infrastructure, solutions and development. Topics could include Enterprise 2.0, Business Intelligence Applications, ECM, Collaboration, Employee Self-Service, Enterprise Search, Technology Infrastructure, Workflow Automation.
Here is what people are thinking of talking about:
- Ryan Coleman – I could put something together on Translation/Localization Workflow automation.
- Carsten Knoch – Porting Web 2.0 to the Enterprise: stop “empowering employees”, start looking for ROI :)
- Jevon Macdonald – Where does the software fit? 4 real enterprise 2.0 case studies
- Peter Childs & Ian Graham – Calendaring in the Enterprise
- Jeff Irving – I’d like to do a session on the value and practice of Domain Modeling during Requirements Analysis of Enterprise Applications.
- Bill Dunlop – I can put together an overview of WCF.
(NOTE: that is “Windows Communication Foundation (formerly code-named “Indigo”) is a set of .NET technologies for building and running connected systems.” for the acronym impaired… :-) - James Christopher – HPC applications and Visualization, how organizations use technology for competitive advantage and value creation.
Enterprise Camp (unconference edition) – January 13th, 2007
http://barcamp.org/EnterpriseCampToronto
