/// FRICTIONLESS BUSINESS USING I.T. TO STREAMLINE OPERATIONS

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1 WHITE PAPER /// FRICTIONLESS BUSINESS USING I.T. TO STREAMLINE OPERATIONS To move fast in today s market companies must work to remove areas of friction that slow their business down. A key element to accelerating business is the effective application of technology. This is creating a shift in technology from being a business enabler to being a business accelerator. As a result organizations need to shift their focus from technology cost to a technology value. This shift requires a broadened view of technology and identifying the ingredients that provide the optimal technology solution. The right blend of technology allows a business to reduce friction allowing accelerated growth and profits. Mark Smith

2 Historically, computers have been used to support business functions. That model has changed. Customer orders have evolved from a salesperson writing the order to a website for customers to enter their own order. Doing research on products has moved from searching periodicals to search engines. Brokers trading stocks have been replaced with trading sites for customers. This transformation has moved IT from applying technology in reaction to business demands to technology driving business demand. Today business functions through technology. Think of Amazon and their Kindle e-book business model. Amazon s technology lets authors who write a book publish it with a few mouse clicks. When a customer wants a book, they can search, read reviews, sample, purchase, and download the book in seconds. All of this can be done using Amazon s technology. Their technology eliminates printing, inventory, clerks to process the orders and take payments, and shipping making the process of publishing and buying a book frictionless. When a hot new book is published, they can sell millions of copies in seconds with no human involvement. They also know that an author and customer can shift their business to Barnes & Noble with a click of a mouse. Thus if Amazon s technologies are not good enough, their business goes away. Pretty strong incentive to do things right. Businesses expect their IT leadership to move beyond supporting computing services for the lowest cost to enabling key business initiatives that provide the greatest value. According to McKinsey, 1 one clear element of a high-performing IT organization is active CIO involvement in the business. This means shifting away from a CIO with a supplier mind-set who provides a cost-effective utility and toward IT leadership that is integrated into discussions of overall business strategy and contributes positively to innovating and building the business. IT is no longer serving a captive internal audience who is stuck using poor technology. If the technology does not service the customers effectively, they take their business elsewhere. Effective IT organizations realize that if they don t get the technology right, their competition will. /////////////////////////////////////// Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. It s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. Steve Jobs To get the technology right, IT organizations need to get the user experience (UX) right. A restaurant with the best food can fail if their service is terrible. Likewise a company with great products but a poor user experience can fail. An application needs a smooth flow and it needs to adapt to the individual user. A one-size-fits-all approach does not work. The application must flow effectively and look right on the users devices. Web users expect a web experience. Mobile users expect an experience adapted to their particular device. Mobile is not mobile. Mobile is iphone mobile, ipad mobile, Android mobile, Android tablet mobile and Windows mobile. And all of these platforms are moving targets with frequent releases of new hardware and operating systems. 1 // WHITE PAPER

3 The shift to a robust customer experience has also put a greater emphasis on the quality of the applications. Customers are intolerant of applications that don t work as advertised. A minor flaw can cause a break point for the customer to choose another vendor. Given the number of customer touch points that applications provide and the number of platforms supported, the role of quality assurance in IT has become both more critical and more complex. Of course, this added emphasis on business value, user experience, more platform support, and higher quality does not negate the demand that projects be done on time and within budget. How are successful organizations reacting to these changes? Broadened Understanding and a Move to Strategy IT leaders are deepening their understanding of all aspects of the business. They are also developing more of the business strategy in conjunction with the other business discipline leaders: marketing, sales, finance, operations, etc. In turn, all of the business disciplines are demanding more from the technology and have a deeper understanding of technology than their predecessors. Thus there are greater demands on IT leadership for the business to remain competitive. In support of this move and to help move the strategy to execution plans, a new role is evolving within organizations the business architect. A business architect looks at the business with a broad view of how to make the business better. It s not about how to let a customer enter an order more easily it s about improving the whole customer experience and tying it to the overall business strategy. The business architect bridges strategy with execution and identifies areas that provide the best return on investment, usually with technology improvements. Business architects are evolving from a variety of roles in the business business analysts, technology architects, subject matter experts, product managers, and engineers. In some organizations they reside in IT, in others they have evolved into their own group. Either way, they are broadly focused on executing the strategy generally through leveraging technology. User Experience (UX) As companies have pushed customers to interact with them more and more through web sites and mobile, the expectations of the user experience have increased. Companies no longer have a captive audience of internal users who have no choice but to use systems that are difficult to work with. Now customers can easily move their business to a competitor who presents a more friendly experience for the user. In simple terms if customers can t use your site or app they won t! 2 // WHITE PAPER

4 Consider some user experience statistics: 97% of websites fail when it comes to user experience. 2 68% of users give up because they think you don t care about them. 3 Testing with just five users can find 85% of your site (or apps) problems. 4 Developers spend 50% of their time fixing issues that could have been avoided with better UX planning & design. 5 Fixing usability problems after release costs 100 times more relative to fixing in design. 6 Correcting usability in development costs 10 times more than fixing it in the design phase. Every dollar invested in UX returns up to $ Those that skip ease of use in the design phase can spend up to 80% of their service costs on unforeseen user requirements down the road. 8 Microsoft believes that Good user experience is the next domain of differentiation in the enterprise. Effective UX that is pleasant, secure, productive, delightful, useful, and adaptive is an expectation. Mobile Mobile devices have created a unique set of problems for IT departments to tackle. More than 50% of the devices connected to the internet are mobile devices of some type. Google searches now return the sites that are mobile friendly higher in the search results than the non-mobile sites. Mobile devices are creating challenges for organizations as employees expect to use their personal mobile devices (BYOD) to perform their job either using their device for , retrieving customer data, or internal information. Employees are also constantly connected through their mobile devices. Some industries, such as banking, are seeing a significant shift in mobile usage. A Federal Reserve survey found that 52% of smartphone users had used mobile banking in the previous 12 months with an additional 11% anticipating using their mobile device in the next 12 months. 9 Some banks interact with their customers almost entirely through their mobile apps. Quality Assurance As application usage have evolved from internal users to customers the tolerance for poor quality has been reduced. Slow responses, system outages, and application defects may cause customers to take their business elsewhere. This increased demand on the quality of the applications has caused IT departments to strengthen their processes around testing and to leverage test automation to help shorten the testing cycles. For organizations providing continuous development, automated testing is a must. According to Forrester, For leading organizations that have achieved [true business agility], it means that development, testing, and delivery become a continuous and automated process. 10 As a result software quality assurance is quickly becoming a critical need in organizations and is providing a challenging career path for software experts. //////////////////////////////////////////////////// HOW UX IS TYPICALLY SEEN Interface Design Visual Design HOW UX SHOULD BE SEEN Interface design Visual design Field research Face-to-face interviewing Creation and administering of tests Gathering, organizing and presenting statistics Documentation of personas and findings Product design Feature writing Requirement writing Graphic arts Interaction design Information Architecture Usability Prototyping Interface layout Taxonomy creation Terminology creation Copy-writing Presentation and speaking Brainstorm coordination Working closely with programmers Company culture evangelism Communication to stakeholders Source: 3 // WHITE PAPER

5 Are You Ready? Rapid changes in the market create competitors where there were none and cause business failures when a business does not act in a quick and nimble manner. Optimizing the value that software development brings to the business creates opportunities for both technologists and for the overall organization. Step back and assess the capabilities of your organization to create new business opportunities by leveraging technology. Ask yourself, are you creating opportunities for your business, or for your competitors? //////////////////////////////////////////////////// About Magenic Founded in 1995 by the same technical minds that still run the company, Magenic delivers software results on the most complex modern application projects. Visit us at magenic.com or call us at to learn more or to engage Magenic today. 1 Why CIOs should be business-strategy partners, McKinsey & Company Insights & Publications, February Tom Gilb, Usability is Good Business, Evaluating User Interface Complexity, Karat, John page full report, page 6. This case study is for informational purposes only. Magenic Technologies, Inc., makes no warranties, express or implied, in this summary. Other product and company names mentioned herein might be the trademarks of their respective owners Magenic Technologies Inc. All rights reserved. 4 // WHITE PAPER