Technology is a key resource for businesses. As technology managers, our job is to direct technology activities to serve the business and its customers. This requires coordination and integration of technology activities with all functional areas of the firm.

“The ultimate purpose of Strategy: a plan, method, or series of maneuvers or stratagems for obtaining goals and results using the right amount of effort.”
—Integrated Strategy Development: Unsurpassable Advantage by Binnur

Technology strategy is shaped within the context of the business. Typically focused on the 3-5 year horizon, its goal is to capture the intent and behaviors for proper utilization and exploitation of technology for the long-term success of the organization. With that, here are the five essentials that need to be addressed in our technology strategy:

1. Technology is the root of the business: So say we All!
2. Technology operates as a system: Resistance is futile
3. We need habits and rituals: Life is a pilgrimage
4. Building our tribe, our ecosystem
5. And finally… Establish technology commandments

For additional ideas on developing technology strategy also check out Your 2011 Technology Development Agenda. 

Technology is the root of the business – So say we All!

Technology for technology sake does not work. Our technology strategy lays the foundation to support our business, and leads our products and customers. To do that, we need to understand what business we are in, and where and how we need to innovate.

What business are we in is an important question as it guides an organization in every facet of its decision making. Fundamentally, it orchestrates how the value is created and delivered, for the firm, its customers, employees and shareholders (Strategy 101: What business are you in.)

To understand where and how we need to innovate, we need to drill down to the profit equation (profits = revenue – cost) and analyze it in the context of technical areas (Innovation and Profitability.) And then, we need to take it a step further and look at how we are competing in the market within the scope of generic competitive strategies (differentiation, segmentation, low cost, fast follower, hybrid, etc.) These steps are important, as it answers not just the why, what and who but also how and when questions.

This analysis establishes the basis of our technology vision and mission: the role our technology will play in our overarching business vision (our inspiration), and the path we will follow to achieve our objectives (our purpose.) This is a starting point, a rough cut of our technology vision and mission. Next, we need to look at internal and external forces and continue to validate our vision and mission as new information emerges.

Technology operates as a system – Resistance is futile

We live in a world, where everything is interconnected, embedded in systems within systems with many connections and interaction points. With that, as our technologies evolve, our behaviors evolve; and as our behaviors evolve, our technologies evolve. Simply, as a closely coupled system, we coevolve: our technological capabilities, social norms, policies, standards and more.

As we work on our technology strategy, we need to acknowledge our technology as part of this larger ecosystem. This boils down to:

1. taking a stock of the technological competencies and capabilities of our firm;
2. analyzing key internal and external assets required for orchestration of its commercialization, realizing that business strategy influences technology vision (and vice versa);
3. modeling our technology as part of this larger ecosystem, and capturing major forces influencing and driving its evolution, including the STEEP forces (and vice versa).

This helps us establish the lay of the land, including a good understanding of the potential shifts, close couplings and gaps that exists. In summary, we answered key questions that are important for our success:

• what technologies are strategically important (core and enabling) with their lifecycle potential;
• how is the firm positioned to deliver with current assets, capabilities and resources, and what are the gaps;
• what are the opportunities and threats with existing and potential competitors and competing technologies;
• how to position the firm towards a given technology and competing technologies: standards, alliances, IP;
• how much to invest for what degree of market entry, performance levels and when;
• how to ready the organization, processes and partners for successful delivery;
• what are the risks and how best to mitigate and address them;
• how to accelerate technology adoption;

We now have our technology vision and mission fully formulated: the role our technology will play in our overarching business vision (our inspiration), and the path we will follow to achieve our objectives (our purpose.) Next, we need to focus on execution.

For more information, check out:

• How to identify forces impacting your innovation
• Strategy 101: What is your core competency
• Create value at every touch point
• Strategy 101: Spot technology expectation gaps via technology life cycle

We need habits and rituals: Life is a pilgrimage

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
—Aristotle

Technology strategy is a living system that constantly evolves with changing business environment, new opportunities and threats, processes and technologies. To top that, strategy is only as good as its execution.

“essence of strategy “is not doing something better than your competitors but doing something different – choosing a unique and reliable position that is rooted in systems of activity that are difficult for others to match.”
—Porter

So, our technology strategy needs to clearly articulate the intents and behaviors that will be developed and adhered to, specifically in the areas of:

• capabilities to develop and acquire;
• processes to integrate and adopt;
• operational aspects of implementation and follow thru.

Building our core competency and ensuring that we maintain sustained differentiation takes effort and focus. Using this triage of capabilities + processes + operations, we can design the optimum trade offs for key dimensions of our technology:

• cost
• availability
• quality
• functionality
• performance
• other factors: social, environmental and policies

As we create the rituals and habits to revisit and check our progress, we need stay flexible. Though we are outlining our intended strategy, given day to day changes that occur in the environment, we need to be sensitive to the emergent strategies. As a technology manager, our job is to deal with complex, dynamic, uncertain environments while continuing to focus on value creation and value capture for our organization. So, we need to evaluate and incorporate those emergent strategies back into the business.

For more information check out:

• Strategy 101 – Why building a successful strategy is hard
• Key factors for successful strategy execution
• Roadmaps and roadmapping: what and why
• Technology strategy 101: Competing technologies… Friend or foe

Building our tribe, our ecosystem

Technology as a single cell organism is not interesting, its commercialization is what brings value to the organization and the society. And, this requires support and collaboration of all functional areas and partners.

In simplistic terms, the ecosystem encapsulates the concept of a community of things and the environment in which they live. In the world of technology and business, this community includes organizations and individuals such as producers, suppliers, competitors, and other stakeholders contributing goods, knowledge, and other deliverables.

By building our ecosystem, we are enabling and encouraging everyone else to make our products better and more valuable. However, the “if you build it, they will come” strategy does not work. We need to not only ensure that we ourselves are successful, but also clearly articulate how our ecosystem partners will flourish. This includes sharing our vision and beliefs about the future, information about our customers, providing incentives and rewards that are financial and motivational, establishing communication channels; basically building an environment where we can all grow and prosper.

For more information on building ecosystems, check out Open the door and let me in.

And, finally… Establish technology commandments

Commandments basically boils down to all the shalls and shall nots of our technology platform. At the core, they reflect and identify our position and philosophy on specific technology related issues. Each of these should be captured as simple points, to ensure clear understanding by ALL parties involved (internal and external, including ecosystem developers). Some areas to consider as follows:

• privacy
• quality
• security
• usability
• sustainability
• performance
• development guidelines

The Kitetail blog is about the many facets of Technology Management. Using Prezi, I put together this brief introduction to Technology Management. For more information on this topic, please check out:

• Two Bits on Technology Management
• Technology vs Product Management

As always, I appreciate your comments. Let me know what you think!

Note: Click “play” (the triangle) to load the presentation. You can step forward/back using the right/left arrows, or select Autoplay under the ‘More’ menu.

Statistically, the successful launch of new products are rare, as there are many challenges to overcome. The successful development of new products incorporating new technologies is even more challenging. Execution matters for success, and is all the more critical for technology focused products. Managing expectations is part of the successful execution process, and this article focuses on how to spot technology expectation gaps.

“Oft expectation fails, and most oft where most it promises; and oft it hits where hope is coldest; and despair most sits.”
— Shakespeare

So, what is a technology expectation gap?! Whenever there is a disparity between the value or experience delivered (feature, performance, quality, …) by your technology vs. what your customers and users actually perceive they are getting, you have an expectation gap!

For high-technology products, the existence of an expectation gap is a given; it is the nature of the beast. New technologies are constantly chasing the old ones, but never quite catching up. If successful, they enable breakthrough innovations, new product categories, markets and users. But until they are successful, there are lot of judgements, hopes, dreams and disappointments that are laid upon them. However, by utilizing concepts from technology maturity, life cycle and diffusion of technologies, you can spot potential expectation gaps (internal and external) and manage them for success, or exploit them as a competitive advantage.

Look Ma! No hands!: technology maturity

The technology maturity process feels a lot like watching kids grow up... From a baby to a child, teen and finally an adult. Understanding this process can give the needed insights and observations for better management of business, technology and expectations. For instance:

• What is crucial and sensible for one stage, may not be appropriate for the next. In the embryonic stage, aggressively developing key functionality is critical to showcase the potential for the new technology. But, as the technology grows and matures, performance and cost become the driving factor.
• Technology maturity is a good risk indicator for increased vulnerabilities, as it will experience emergence of substitutes.
• Recognizing the maturity level of a technology can feed into your business strategy and portfolio management process. Such as, relocating resources away from mature and aging technologies.

When a new technology enters the scene, its performance and functionality will not match the existing technology capabilities. This is expected, as one to one substitution is rarely an incentive for the new technology creators. However, as you integrate/introduce this new technology with your product, your customers and partners may not share the same excitement that you feel about this new technology. And frankly, your internal partners and your program team, Customer Support, Marketing, Sales, etc., maybe your loudest critics.  To better understand the conflict, lets take a look at the product life cycle and technology adoption framework.

Design for the technology adoption

I previously wrote about technology adoption and the importance of designing for technology adoption (along with a few others tagged as s-shaped-adoption-curve.) This is a quick recap, as I don’t want to repeat myself. These articles emphasize that:

• Technology and innovation is a change: change in the behavior of customers, in how they work and produce. It is important to recognize the change, design and manage it accordingly.
• You need to understand the needs, values and characteristics of your customers in the context of where your technology and product is positioned, as well as where your customers believe it is positioned at. Through this understanding, you can focus at delivering value to increase adoption rates.
• It is important not to fall in love with your own technology and ideas, but to continuously analyze and question your assumptions.

If you have a one-to-one-to-one match between where your technology, your product and your customers are at, life is wonderful! You aligned all the dots. However, technology has a life of its own, and every product incorporates one or more technologies… So…

What a beautiful life… the life of technology…

Technology expectation gap occurs when your technology maturity, product life cycle and customer stages conflict. The result could be a simple irritation and loss of customers, to more extreme public outcry such as Google Buzz experienced when it was released without appropriate privacy controls (and later their public apology. I guess they weren’t paying much attention to all the racket over at Facebook…)

These gaps can be experienced in the various dimensions, such as cost, performance, scalability, flexibility, functionality, usability, deployability and maintainability. And, they may have differing impacts to your internal and external customers/partners. Once you internalized the tension and are aware of the gap, you can use communication tools, ecosystem partners and positioning strategies to mitigate impact.

Mismatch of technology/product with customer segment

Positioning your new technology for adoption by a maturing customer segment will certainly raise eyebrows. Recently, Google announced the WebP image format for the Web. WebP’s adoption as a substitute will be interesting to watch, as existing image solutions have been around for a long time. With that, key areas that need to be managed are:

• penetration to the existing ecosystem in order to speed the adoption process: browsers, content creators, image converters, content management systems, … Building ecosystem maps, identifying key partners, control and influence points will certainly help the process.
• development and evolution of WebP functionality to address existing concerns and achieve the good enough stage. Communicating planned roadmaps with time frames, and being clear with users on WebP best practices (rather than positioning it for mass market) can help position it appropriately with skeptics.

Migrate to a substitute technology, or upgrade your existing technology

Whether you migrate to a substitute technology, or even just upgrade your existing technology, you will experience some level of discontent. This could be experienced as deployment and maintainability woes by your support team, or performance, flexibility and functionality conflicts for your customers.

Understanding your customers’ use models, as well as extreme use cases will shape your migration and upgrade strategy. When appropriate, call on your ecosystem for support, such in the case with iOS and H.264 vs. Flash. Utilizing HTML5 and transcoding, Apple’s ecosystem has been increasingly delivering H.264 video to iPhones/iPads. In summary, instead of working to increase the capabilities of substitute technology in all dimensions, think outside the box to see how else you can reduce gaps in acceptance.

Announce the discontinuance of your technology or product functionality

For product managers, managing discontinuance is a challenging area. Perhaps more so due to emotional attachment than factual reasoning. Either way, when your customers are arguing against your discontinuance plans, you better listen. I still remember when Netflix tried to retire Profiles…

When appropriate, offering the new technology along with the existing one can allow your customers to migrate themselves, such was the case with transition from floppy drives to CDs and beyond. Another strategy that could work is using ecosystem partners to fill-in gaps as needed. However, as in the case with Netflix, if you have no workable solutions, be ready to retract on your announcements.

Implement a technology as its standard is being defined

There’s nothing like building the airplane wings while the plane is lifting off the tarmac! Implementing a new standard as the standard itself is being defined will certainly appeal to your visionaries and early adopters. Clearly communicating the capabilities of the new technology, such as the HTML5 showcases, will feed excitement and accelerate adoption. However, positioning and maintaining clear communication is a must, as technology implementation or its interpretation will change, potentially resulting in frustrated customers.

Change your technology strategy at midcourse

OK! This is given; technology directions can and will change on a dime. However, with recent discontent around Microsoft’s Silverlight, I had to mention this one. I don’t believe the root issue is the change of strategy by Microsoft. Rather, the fact that people don’t like change and uncertainty, especially when it is delivered in the form of an unwelcome surprise. This issue, yet again, highlights the importance of maintaining communication with your customers, and utilizing your close relations with your supporters when change is coming. Through this, you can prepare your customers, but also build a compelling story that they can rally behind to support you in the shift (instead of feeling like they wasted their precious time and effort…)

Increase customers’ intangible costs

Any changes to your technology and technology strategy will somehow impact your customers’ bottom line. This could be due to unexpected system upgrades, time and cost associated with learning the new technology, or just changes in the usability of your system. Key point here is not to underestimate the impact of your changes, but to help your customers to transition successfully. Alpha/beta testing can help identify unanticipated impacts, and highlight strategies to address existing gaps prior to your release.

Parting thoughts…

“There is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new system” – Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

A bit of understanding and utilizing frameworks can help to spot gaps. Through this, and technology and product roadmap alignment, you could do a better job of communicating and managing these gaps. These frameworks can also help you identify gaps in your competitors’ offerings and enable you to build a more competitive offering.

Technorati Tags: technology maturity, technology expectation gaps

This article is not specifically about cloud computing technology, but about the insights it has spawned… However, for anyone that is interested, my cloud computing solution comparison notes are here; I also recommend Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing.

As I studied and researched cloud computing solutions from Google, Amazon and Microsoft, I came to realize how much of corporate personality spills into our technological creations, you could say we create in our image… One could argue, this is all about branding. And, as a Buddhist principle states that all views are empty of inherent existence, I would not argue: views rather depend on who is looking, and when, and for what purpose. However, I see branding as a conscious and explicit activity, while our process of creation is unconscious representative of our true-selves.

As I was reading Ackoff’s The Art of Problem Solving: Accompanied by Ackoff’s Fables, I had a humorous insight into the personality of Google, Amazon and Microsoft. Ackoff indicated that the philosophers of ancient Greece divided the pursuits of man into four major categories:

1. The scientific: the pursuit of truth;
2. The political-economic: the pursuit of power and plenty;
3. The ethical-moral: the pursuit of goodness and virtue;
4. The aesthetic: the pursuit of beauty;

Other than my obvious oversimplification, here is what I noticed as I was pondering over my notes…

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Amazon has put together perhaps the most comprehensive and mature set of services. As their solutions are easy to comprehend and most portable from the development and deployment perspective, they should appeal to the IT-minded folks. Initially what has started as an infrastructure (IaaS) approach is now progressing towards platform solution (PaaS). Leveraging their core competency of operational excellence, Amazon has given the control to its customers, including the management of data and application deployment locations around the world.

With all that, Amazon is utilizing the pay-as-you-go service. Though this is certainly appealing, looking through the pricing terms felt like I would be nickeled and dimed even IF I really paid attention to my application design… (Note that the need to design-for-the-cloud applies to all cloud computing technologies in general.) With that, I place Amazon on the pursuit of the power and plenty column.

Google AppEngine

With the motto of do no evil, Google automatically moves to the category of pursuing goodness and virtue. Google’s AppEngine approach is in complete support of this pursuit, working to deliver cloud computing vision to anybody with as little effort as possible. Using a platform approach (PaaS), Google delivers automatic self-healing, self-scaling applications. All one has to do is to develop within the Google’s framework, follow their best practices, and everything else will be handled auto-magically.

Following Google’s tradition of giving away large quotas, AppEngine is also free up to a certain level of usage per-day. In addition, the developers can set daily budgets where Google Checkout is available. Pricing as well as the development environment would attract startups and Open Source community, which would continue to give more goodness back to the Google’s ecosystem. However, the customers’ lack of control over the infrastructure can challenge and raise further concerns for privacy and security in the cloud (see Forrester’s Interactive Data Protection Heat Map.)

Microsoft Windows Azure

In typical Microsoft fashion, the Windows Azure platform has something for everyone, including a flat-rate pricing structure. Designed as a platform approach (PaaS) with the possibility to provide infrastructure control (IaaS) in the future, Azure is a hybrid-cloud focus bridging enterprise and the cloud. Windows Azure also introduces a different development approach to cloud computing with the concept of Web roles and Worker roles to support auto-scaling via software. In order to encourage adoption and lure developers, Azure supports whatever programming language you want to use, from .NET to Java to Python.

Though one may question, it feels like Microsoft is in the pursuit of truth with what seems like constant drive to redo/rewrite/re-architect/re-invent, while solving everyone’s problems and converting them to their platform. Borrowing from Karl Marx’s argument, are they the opiate of the people?

If Apple was in the ring, and there are rumors of future Apple cloud computing services, I would classify them as the pursuit of beauty. Just think, the most beautiful, completely controlled cloud-based AppStore that brings the elegance of Apple products to the clouds.

“In the process of developing an accurate assessment of who you actually are, you need to appreciate the disparity between how you appear to your own mind and how you indeed exist.”

–Dalai Lama

As I mentioned earlier, I am oversimplifying… However, every aspect of what we create (packing, documentation, web site design, technology philosophy, …) reflects on our personality and attracts customers accordingly. In reality, we don’t stop there, as businesses also attract and hire people like themselves. Which creates the cycle of similarity: similar products, similar feature sets, similar customers, similar thinking, similar mistakes, … No wonder many established firms struggle with innovation!

With that said, I believe this process, this behavior is normal. It is human nature. Given that the process of change is hard, instead we can seek to better understand the world that we operate in and design accordingly. Recently I read an article in the Building Design Strategy: Using Design to Achieve Key Business Objectives book: Design Strategies for Technology Adoption. The authors outlined six generic design strategies to drive technology adoption: endorse, curate, integrate, economize, play, refresh. Here is a synopsis of the article:

Innovation is one thing; success in the marketplace, quite another. Alonzo Canada, Pete Mortensen, and Dev Patnaik offer a framework in which design becomes the channel for uniting these two realities. Identifying five clusters of users – innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards – and numerous hands-on examples, this trio of authors advocates tailoring designs to the priorities of each group.

Understanding the technology adoption and diffusion process is critical for every entrepreneur. Cloud computing takes this further in the sense that, it extends beyond immediate customers to those customers’ customers for its adoption. Using a methodology like this to analyze technology adoption early on in the development process can bring balance to our natural human tendencies for developing products for ourselves. For cloud computing, thought process might go something like this:

• endorse (cater to innovators) Focused mainly on communicating the benefits and advantages of a given technology, cloud computing already passed this stage. Just check out Apps.Gov!
• curate (cater to early adopters) Focused on the early adopters, this stage is like targeted, 1:1 marketing that emphasizes key desirable benefits, functionality and return on investment for that early adopter. I would say cloud computing is at this stage, where every cloud computing vendor is marketing their differentiation to attract customers. The specific features currently includes the ease of building self-scaling applications or introducing tools and services for automatic scalability, and hybrid-cloud approach of bridging private and public clouds.
• integrate (cater to early majority) This stage is focused on attracting mainstream users, who are looking for solutions that work without compromises. What does this mean for cloud computing?! With sites like Apps.Gov, many end users who are late adopters, laggers and mainstreams will be adopting cloud computing. With that, the cloud computing technology feature set needs to satisfy both the developers and their end-customers. This includes improvement in the areas of security, privacy, governance (ability to set policies and monitor), performance and SLAs (Service Level Agreements), along with end user specific requirements, such as simplifying synchronization on and off the cloud, ease of content access across devices and platforms, reliability, trust, and of course performance.
• economize (cater to late majority) In the technology adoption curve, this stage is all about cost-reduction and commoditization. Recently Amazon launched EC2 Spot Instances, where customers can bid for the unused computing capacity and have access to resources as long as their bid exceeds the current Spot Price. Just think, global CloudExchange! To enable this level of ubiquity, we need cloud standards to drive interoperability and interconnectedness between clouds at a global level.
• play (cater to laggards) Laggars lag everyone in the adoption curve… The authors recommend making the familiar unfamiliar in order to appeal to laggards, where the motivation is not about technology. Similar to the VoIP’s entrance into the home as a bundled package with cable for voice data, cloud computing could shape into services and products that could appeal to laggards, such as TiVo-on-the-clouds.
• refresh (cater to new markets) Once cloud computing reaches its vision of computing as a basic utility delivered over the internet, what is next? How could the cloud computing vendors refresh and open up new markets? Maybe Amazon should start the Computing Affiliate Program to enable individuals to feed computing resources into the grid, just like solar into a power grid to add extra capacity.

As Drucker indicated, innovation is an effect in economy and society; it is a change in behavior of customers, in how they work and produce something (Innovation Process: 3 Things You Can Count On.) Using frameworks such as technology diffusion process and designing strategies to drive technology adoption, we can gain the needed insight and understanding to accelerate and enable the cloud as a globally ubiquitous computing utility delivered over the internet.

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, technology adoption, design strategies for technology adoption

I came from Google, search for interface between R&D and CS and apparently I came to the right place. Most of your article is clear to me as we are doing it day to day, more or less. Although I’m in the opposite chair (CS manager), I do understand the pressure on R&D as well as on CS. Question is, in an organization which has a habit of issuing new sub versions and major versions quite often (and of course CS attention for bug solving decreases) what can be done in order to assure timely bug fixes, as well as keep releasing new versions as often as possible.

The question of “how to manage frequent release cycles with minimal turmoil and maximum alignment (R&D, CS, Marketing)” is a good one. I highlighted our processes and best practices that worked well for my team. These should not be a surprise, as they are aligned with the agile development best practices. However, note that implementation and execution of these practices require vigor and disciple for all parties involved. I would love to hear from others’ experiences.

Depending on your situation, management and development processes, organizational structure, or a combination of both will help you build a solution that best works for your organization. Please realize the different roles and responsibilities that are needed for successful execution. With that, build the needed reward and recognition into your structure for all involved. At the end, it takes a team to deliver, even if on the surface some happens to spend more time at the bench than others.

Agreed upon philosophy and decision-making framework for managing releases.

You cannot minimize turmoil and increase alignment if there is no predictable schedule or decision-making process for product releases. Your framework should help to:

1. establish predictable schedules for minor and major releases;
2. differentiate between minor vs. major functionality;
3. outline a process for managing your “Big List” of functionality and capturing it as a product roadmap;
4. establish an escalation process for resolving conflicts;
5. publish and communicate the POR (Plan Of Record).

Small program team with regularly run scrums (2-3 times weekly) who prioritize, schedule and manage the “Big List” of functionality and upcoming releases.

Your small cross-functional team has the empowerment to:

1. establish an agreed upon theme and set of features for each planned release;
2. manage the product roadmap details (specific features and goals) for at least the next 2-3 release cycles (depending on your release schedule, of course);
3. resolve resource conflicts by re-prioritizing scheduled minor & major release features;
4. say ‘No!’ to urgent but unimportant requests, and follow up with ‘and here is what we can do instead’.

SCM infrastructure with a branching strategy to support your build & release cycles.

An effective branching strategy is needed to establish a structure for managing your code, delivering multiple releases and supporting parallel development. Note, this is a full time job (especially at the beginning) that also requires your senior engineers to be involved in the definition. Your branching strategy will impact your architecture, your code structure, how you version, how it fits with your build & test structure, and even how you document.

Test infrastructure, test automation and rich test library to support needs of your agile development.

Yes, a good test infrastructure is a must for quality assurance. However, to effectively support your branching strategy (creating new branches and merging back in), you need to pay even more attention to your test automation and test library by providing smoke tests, integration tests, compatibility tests, validation tests, regression tests, … Your engineers will thank you!

Organizational Structure

Effective management of engineering resources is required to support parallel development and multiple release cycles. Goal is to maximize engineering productivity by minimizing splitting of time between defect fixing and implementing future functionality. As it can be challenging to balance the short-term demands with long-term needs, many organizations establish a separate team to support the current products: Current Product Engineering (CPE) team. Focused ONLY on the current product bug fixes, minor product releases and closely aligned with Customer Support team, these teams usually have a separate reporting structure as well (to minimize distractions.)

As an example, to support our product customization needs (different than minor releases), we established a CPE team. This enabled quicker response to customers without impacting our product platform roadmap. However, it also further stressed our branching strategy and our release management process. In addition, the separation can increase the complexity of internal communications, as it means yet-another-team to coordinate and bridge silos with. Building your CPE team might be a challenge as well, as many engineers prefer to be on the cutting edge of development. However, right incentives and recognitions, along with focus on customer connection and satisfaction should help with your recruiting activities.

Final thoughts

In my experience, there is no perfect structure for managing frequent product releases with parallel development. As Deming’s cycle of: Plan, Do, Check, Act illustrates, this is a journey: it is an iterative process, that requires work and discipline. Hopefully these practices will help you get further on your journey.

What has worked for you and your teams?

Technorati Tags: product release cycles, current product engineering

Here is a quick backgrounder on the issue. Adobe’s Flash Video (originally developed by Macromedia) is a container format that is used for delivering video over the Internet. Many popular sites use this format to embed video and other content on the Web, such as YouTube, Hulu, Facebook, and Flash-based online games. Through Adobe Flash Player and browser plug-ins, Flash-Video is made available to users. Putting it mildly, Apple has no plans to support Flash on its iPod/iPhone family of products, while Adobe continues to push for its adoption. Instead, Apple has been pushing the HTML5 standard with H.264. For those that are interested, check out the Daring Fireball‘s summary on the topic: Apple, Adobe, and Flash.

There are numerous examples of competing technologies: VHS vs. Betamax, Blu-Ray vs. HD DVD, GSM vs. CDMA, .Net vs. J2EE, various flavors of Unix and wireless standards, open vs. DRM, MP3 vs. AAC, AC vs. DC (no, not the music group but Tesla vs. Edison)… In many cases, competing technologies encourage innovation, arguably, sometimes at the cost of building a rich ecosystem. At the same time it is not uncommon for users to experience confusion over compatibility and interoperability, such as in the case with having too many multi-media formats and having to choose a player to match the video format. However, as a technology becomes more attractive, it will see a higher adoption rate, and increasing compatibility and interoperability with others as its ecosystem becomes richer.

This is all good, but as a technology company where do you put your money? As our computing infrastructure becomes more complex and interconnected, your customers are now looking for a total system experience: high-level of system performance and interoperability with others. With this, you need to not only control your technology but also influence and direct related technology decisions with your partners and competitors. To do this, you need to evaluate your technology strategy and decisions within the context of the purpose of your business, technology attractiveness and your ecosystem. 

The purpose of your business

“There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.”

– Peter F. Drucker; The Essential Drucker

With this, Drucker continues and states that, “Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two — and only these two — basic functions: marketing and innovation.” Lets apply that thought process to Apple. In a previous article, I highlighted that …By owning hardware, software, online services and everything in between, Jobs successfully controls the end-to-end customer experience, and thereby delivers on his core value: products that work seamlessly together and seldom break down.

Given this clear focus, Apple’s position on Flash-Video (remember, Apple does not use Flash-Video in any content delivered from iTunes store) and its tight control over the App Store is not a surprise (preventing developers from impeding or disturbing Apple’s ecosystem), especially with the iTunes Music Store universe it has created for its customers. Contrast this to Western Digital with a purpose to help you collect, manage and use digital information. This drives their product design decisions, such in the case with their Western Digital WD TV Live Network-ready HD Media Player which supports the widest variety of formats possible. Having purchased both toys (AppleTV & WDTV), I enjoy the freedom and flexibility I get from WDTV with its open architecture, vs. the restriction placed by AppleTV. With that said, I appreciate the ecosystem of the iPhone and its apps, and how well it plays with my MacBook versus my previous Motorola Pebl.

The government can also influence which standards and technologies you need to provide. It is common for governments to take leadership in technology development and standard setting, such as with the Chinese government’s initiative of the AVS (Audio Video Standard) compression codec, a competitor to H.264/AVC. If the standard becomes commercially successful, it would not only put Chinese electronic companies on the map, but would also reduce their licensing/royalty payments significantly. Standards, regulations and policies enable governments to:

• regulate goods for the safety of their consumers;
• encourage prosperity of local economy (by licensing domestic standards vs. paying for foreign standards);
• push for compatibility and interoperability (domestic electricity and plug standards) which benefits consumers and producers;
• sponsor development of emerging technologies (such as green-tech).

In summary, your technology strategies, along with your core competencies, need to be aligned to support your business purpose. Perhaps Facebook’s recent announcement on their HipHop for PHP technology development is a good example of focusing on core competencies (in this case PHP development) and building/leading technologies to lead with that strength (transform PHP code to optimized C++ for better performance and scalability.) Through this alignment, you can evaluate relevant technologies and start outlining your strategic position for each: lead/follow, in-house development/outsource/acquire, invest/divest/migrate, …

Technology attractiveness

Understanding and evaluating along these different dimensions and factors would help determine not only the attractiveness of a given technology, but also the factors and trends to watch for as technology implementation progresses. Scenario analysis and what if? brainstorming will help determine trends and identify critical potential inflection points to watch for. Take H.264/AVC digital video coding standard’s license and Mozilla’s stance on embedding the technology. Recently MPEG LA extended its license term where it will not charge royalties for Internet Video that is free to end users till December 31, 2015. What would that mean for competing technologies like Ogg Theora?

History repeats itself, and it could provide guidance on trends that will influence the technology adoption. It is always easier to identify inflection points once the technology war is over. The Adult Entertainment Industry (AEI) was identified as the decision maker in the war between VHS and Betamax. With Sony’s refusal to work with the AEI, Betamax ultimately lost out. As a result, all eyes were on the AEI when next-gen hi-def competition started (Blu-Ray vs. HD DVD.)

Richness of the ecosystem

In simplistic terms, ecosystem encapsulates the concept of a community of things and the environment in which they live. In the world of technology and business, this community includes organizations and individuals such as producers, suppliers, competitors, and other stakeholders contributing goods, knowledge, and other deliverables. Here is an announcement from Microsoft that captures their focus on the IPTV ecosystem from 2007.

The richness of the ecosystem certainly adds to its attractiveness. Again, take the competition between Blu-Ray and HD DVD as an example. When AEI selected HD DVD for their format (mainly driven by production costs), many assumed the format wars were over. At least until the Sony Play Station came out with a Blu-Ray drive, and the owners started to request Blu-Ray DVDs from the AEI. This newly expanded market, coupled with the fact that support from more movie studios reduced Blu-Ray DVD production costs, resulted in the AEI’s move to Blu-Ray.

Richness of the ecosystem can certainly influence/change your technology directions as well. These changes can be driven by your competitors, as in the case with Amazon.com introducing DRM-free music downloads, which resulted in increased customer desire, driving Apple to also provide DRM-free music on iTunes store. The richness of an ecosystem also influences new product concepts, such as Apple building on the strength of iPod and launching iPhone/iTouch family of products.

Thoughts on reducing your development risk…

As I mentioned before, there is no silver bullet when it comes to knowing which technology(s) to invest in. However, you can be smart on how you develop your products/technologies. These include, but not limited to:

• Adapt agile development practices, so you can rapidly shift as your products, markets and customers change. Utilize technology roadmaps as a guidance, and manage migrations as things change.
• Get your customers involved through controlled beta testing, such as with the YouTube HTML5 Video Player.
• Spend time understanding your product requirements and your technology dependencies, and establish a loosely coupled system architecture to reduce dependency.
• Leverage external relationships to reduce development effort and share risks.
• Don’t depend on the if I build it, they will come philosophy of just building the technology. Rather, help its ecosystem flourish with complementary technologies and products.
• Continuously look for ways to build economies of scale and improve your learning curve.
• Be smart about the cost of technology (direct, indirect and hidden). But also take this a step further and analyze the cost to your customers (Sony’s Playstation 3 consumes significantly more electricity than its competitors.)
• As important as standards are, your customers’ performance and functionality requirements come first. So focus on your customers’ needs while designing systems that are compatible and interoperate with standards.

Technorati Tags: technology strategy, technology competition

• Don’t make me feel and look stupid
• I need a dependable buddy
• Grow with me
• When you piss me off, say you’re ‘sorry‘
• When it’s time to part ways, don’t get angry

There are various opinions on what makes good software, especially from the perspective of developers and designers. I did stumbled upon Joel  Spolsky‘s article titled Good Software Takes 10 Years. Get Used To it. Though Joel presents a valid argument, my own experience tells me the opposite can also be true: as software matures, odds are that it will become bloated, complicated and crappy.

Here is a question: what is in your top 10 list of great software? I truly struggled with my list, but here goes nothing…

1. Vi – yes, really!
2. WordPress – contradictory to my previous statement, this software is getting better with each year
3. Django – love the development platform and the user community
4. Evernote – it just works, anywhere and even for free
5. Google reader on iPhone – it simplifies information overload
6. iSync – because it connects my life… when it works……..
7. … and that’s all I could come up with for my top 10

If we look at what makes bad software, it usually boils down to not knowing who your customer is. Even then, as my realtor used to say, “For every house there is a buyer. The trick is to be patient and to wait.” Given that premise, for every piece of software, there is a buyer. We just happen to refer to that person as the ‘visionary‘.

True, what makes great software is in the eye of the beholder. And when it come to software, there are many beholders: developers, testers, customer support, shareholders, users, purchasers, news media, your boss, your boss’ boss, ….  Perhaps there is a high correlation between beautifully written an documented code and a great software, but the reality is that your users rarely care about how well the code is written. However, research has shown that source-code metrics that show high internal design and code quality do correlate with maintainability of code. And your users do care about this from the aspect of backwards compatibility, quick time to issue resolution, time to market with new functionality and such.

Good software is as much about emotions as it is about the overall software quality, features, ease of use and such. Case in point, my own emotional turmoil as I struggled to program robots with the software product that shall be nameless…. Yet, in our product development process, we focus on what we can quantify (defect count, performance numbers, …) and less on understanding our users’ emotional feelings toward our product. To differentiate your software from everyone else’s, start paying attention to what emotions you stir in your customers.

Don’t make me look and feel stupid

Especially in front of a group of tech-savvy pre-teen boys! Fear is a very basic human emotion. We all want to be seen as intelligent individuals. We see our environment, our tools as extensions of ourselves. Not only we don’t want to be seen stupid, but we want our choices to shine as well.

Recently Strand Consult suggested that iPhone users are suffering from a form of Stockholm Syndrome – the condition in which the kidnapped begin to show loyalty to their kidnappers. Personally, I don’t understand how a built-in radio in my phone would make my iPhone better for me (yup, I am one of those sufferers….) But it does highlight the intimate relationship people build with their environment, applications and mobile phones.

If your product is preventing your users from experiencing your promise, you are making them feel and look stupid. In my case poor quality software coupled with poor documentation on how the programming environment interacted as a system resulted in very unhappy kids and coaches. The fact that the company charged for upgrades made the overall emotion even worse. It is one thing to be stuck with a bad software, it is another to actually have to pay for the privilege….

Need a dependable buddy

Our brains work on autopilot. We automatically search for patterns and respond accordingly. Given that, consistency is key to how fast we achieve mastery over our tools. Take Apple’s Aperture for instance. I recently moved from iPhoto to Aperture. And, I want to love Aperture… Yet, this software puzzles me, as with each new interaction I get a different pattern and response combination. I haven’t figured out its mystery, but I still want to love Aperture…

As your software gets feature rich and flexible, avoid the natural tendency to bloat it unnecessarily. But even more importantly, maintain the consistency and natural patterns that exist in your software and in your users’ environment. Your users have come to depend on them.  Take file system operations as an example. We are used to copying/moving/renaming files, so your software should not throw a fit just because I copied a file from one folder to another.

AND grow with me

Who wants to be a beginner forever?! As humans, we are wired to excel, to move quickly from beginner to intermediate and maybe even expert status. Face it, if we can’t feel competent using our tools, we move on. So what does that mean for your software?

Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann and David Cronin emphasize the need to optimize for the intermediates in About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design. They indicated that most users are neither beginners nor experts; they are intermediates. With that, their recommendation is to:

• rapidly and painlessly bring beginners into intermediacy;
• avoid putting obstacles in the way of intermediates who want to become experts;
• keep perpetual intermediates happy as they stay firmly in the middle of the skill spectrum;

Looking back, if all I needed was to move a robot forward, backward or side to side for small well defined blocks, the software product that shall be nameless might have been fine. But as I want more, it’s time to dump this software and move on to one that will enable me to grow.

When you piss me off, say you’re ‘sorry’

This is a basic and fundamental principle when it come to writing software. Yet, writing understandable error messages seems to be a lost art… Though I appreciate relaunching the program immediately in the case of a crash, why did you crash in the first place? And you look guilty — what else did you mess up in the process??!

When it’s time to part ways, don’t get angry…

Providing uninstallers and tools to migrate existing data/files to other platforms might go against common sense, especially when we consider the cost of switching as a competitive advantage. Yet, if your customer has already decided to dump you, the least you can be is courteous and polite. Think about it, if we stay friends, you have a better chance of being introduced to another friend of mine, or for me to consider another one of your products. And as you are leaving, do make sure to completely clean up after yourself….

Finally, remember the reciprocity rule of human behavior. Over time, people share similar attitudes and feelings towards each other. So, if you don’t respect and appreciate your users, eventually they will catch up and you will be out of a job! Next time you are evaluating the quality of your software, make sure to consider how your product makes your customers feel.

Happy Holidays!

Technorati Tags: software quality, good software

I have been spending my free time by going back to my roots: engineering and software development. My time is spent acquainting myself with the Django platform, reading about product design, and coaching a FIRST LEGO® League (FLL) team with my husband for a robotics competition coming up in December. With that, in recent weeks, I have been playing with LEGO® MINDSTORMS® NXT, including turning my dining room into a robotics lab! I have to admit, I am new to this, since LEGO® was not part of my life when I was growing up. And although my son has been involved with LEGO for most of his life, I have only been an occasional sidekick, helping out when he needed it. I must say, I missed out, but now I’m working hard to make it up.

Though we are coaching 10-13 year-old boys, I noticed an amazing amount of similarity between playing with LEGOs and managing engineering projects. I hope you enjoy my observations, and please let me know if I left out anything.

Note that I find job titles personally challenging… Though I specifically mention engineering managers, for me this covers anyone that has the duties of managing a technology and product combination, along with the responsibilities of people management.

Generalist.. Specialist.. Aha! Specialized Generalist!

This topic deserves a more in-depth discussion, as it is an area I ponder about a lot. I am a technology generalist with a specialization in technology management and product development. Yet, I wonder if I should have a technology specialization area, but then question what I would have to let go in return…

An engineering manager needs to be a generalist for successful commercialization of technology and its products. By definition, her focus should be on integrating and bridging technology, business, people and executing the engineering development life cycle. Yet, to be successful in this integration role, the engineering manager also needs to have sufficient understanding of the technology, product and industry, i.e. specialization. In her role, she must:

• Be part of the team: speaking the same language;
• Lead the team: defining and building the new language, norms and culture;
• Have imagination and creativity for what is possible;
• Understand practicality for what is doable given constraints and resources;
• Have wisdom to understand where the risks and challenges are;
• Have knowledge to educate, promote and close gaps;
• Be fearless to jump in, explore and show the way;
• Have the power to inspire, motivate and drive results;
• Have the ability to distill all for effective (and efficient) tools and processes;

All this is necessary to be a good engineering manager. I lost count of the number hours I spent surfing through different robot designs, learning about the parts’ strengths and limitations, figuring out how to best navigate the NXT-G software, and just understanding what it means to build a decent robot through hands on exploration and prototyping. It all helps to build the next generation of engineers and hopefully successful performance at the competition.

Design for modularity and reliability

Anyone who is a LEGO fan won’t be surprised to hear that there is a real science behind how to design LEGO systems, how to build them for stability, reliability and strength. My 11-year-old son seems to have the knack for this! He seems to know all the different LEGO parts, how to best put them together, how to make them modular and yet still attractive.

FLL challenges require different contraptions to navigate and complete FLL missions within a set (short!) time limit. This challenges your critical thinking skills in how best to design and engineer your robot. With that, modularity and reliability of your design drives the repeatability and performance of your results. Through experience and lots and lots of prototyping and testing, you learn:

• about real-life constraints (ambient light, inertia, gravity…);
• reliability and repeatability is king queen!
• how to setup for easy real-time product reconfiguration;
• that nothing goes as planned. So test, test, and more test!

Empower… Motivate… Time manage!

Organizational behavior and motivation is a complex and broad topic. Interestingly enough, the challenge of how to effectively motivate doesn’t seem to depend on age…

FLL challenge is about kids and driven by kids. As coaches, our role is to inspire, empower and motivate for results, with hopes to grow future engineers. It is amazing to see how moving a robot utilizing a touch sensor for navigation can brighten a youngster’s day.

Encouraging creative and outside-of-the-box-thinking is a primary focus of the coaches. Our success depends on how well we read each child, and learn what motivates them into action. Believe me, each has their own degree of focus, from some being extremely short to others who would shame many adults. With that, managing time is our most important element. We walk a fine line between providing enough space to explore/empower and minimizing wasted time. There is nothing more powerful than showing kids what they can achieve through careful handholding and directing. As they say, the more things change, the more they stay the same…

Building a productive workforce

Time to market is the new reality. Yet, many factors affect productivity, which is the key driver in time to market:

• environment,
• skills and experiences,
• tools and processes,
• external resources,
• quality, …

As engineering managers, our job is to understand the possibilities, assess the risks, and close the gaps in any and all areas. We also need to understand what is under our control, and make peace with anything that is not. Turning my dining room into a robotics lab is my way of controlling the physical environment, to improve individual focus and increase team work.

However, tools and processes also directly affect individual creativity and productivity. Tools can have natural constraints (such as with the NXT-G development environment), and processes need to fit within the team culture and capabilities. Tailoring tasks to align each individual’s strengths, motivations and weaknesses is key to building a happy and productive workforce. And for this age, perhaps any age, when everything fails, showing, demonstrating and proving possibilities works to kick things into high gear.

Value of rich ecosystems

“Ecosystem” refers to the concept of a community working and functioning together as a unit with its developers, suppliers, customers, users, manufacturers, competitors, research groups, … Anyone who has ever evaluated a new technology, utilized the Open Source community or just Googled an unexplained error message from your operating system understands the importance of having a rich user community.

LEGO has a strong universal brand with a very active user community. Even with their strong control of LEGO brand, one can find LEGO part suppliers, such as with robotic sensors (though, this is still small when compared to Apple’s ecosystem). At the same time, their brand strength doesn’t carry to LEGO’s education division, such as with legoeducation.us. I recently ordered two different LEGO robotics education set. It was quite humorous to receive two sets of parts and storage trays, where one set’s trays came in a mid-size blue plastic LEGO storage container, and the other was just trays in a generic brown shipment box. In addition, annoyingly enough, I cannot get a container for these trays, as they’re slightly too big to fit into any containers sold by the company. Fortunately, none of their building bricks seem to have this type of incompatibility…

LEGO has a very rich user base: LEGO Club, numerous blogs, LEGO Engineering, MINDSTORMS Community NXT, FIRST Forums, … This rich set of resources and a large community to share with makes the LEGO experience useful, interesting and fun for anyone and at any level of expertise. Just think what it would mean to you, if you could nurture and reap the benefits of a rich ecosystem and the strong brand of your product.

Building LEGOs are easy…

And, fun! They demonstrate the challenges an engineering manager faces, including topics that I haven’t touched like rewards, dealing with disruptive  children employees, agile development processes, introducing new tools and technology to your teams, testing and product quality, … Though they may seem like toys, they are real engineering projects, requiring curiosity, ingenuity and a lot of persistence.

Wish us luck at the upcoming competition!

Technorati Tags: LEGO, FLL, engineering management

Note: This article is written from the perspective of technology development and leading R&D teams.

Developing technology is a relatively simple task when compared to the challenge of getting it diffused and adopted throughout the intended ecosystem. Although there are others, understanding customer needs, wants and overall psychology is one of the big hurdles that has to be overcome for success. This journey starts at home with your Customer Support team. Yet, there tends to be a gap between R&D and Customer Support teams during the innovation process. Here are my experiences on where the gaps can occur and strategies that worked for me for closing (or, when needed, widening) them.

Prioritize Customer Support correctly

On the road to your product release, you may be tempted to prioritize Customer Support behind everything else. After all, what could be more important than schedule, cost, functionality, … Believe me, it will happen, I have been there. And everyone in the program team will agree to that prioritization…. However, for new products and innovations, it is the wrong decision. Innovation is about change. Your Customer Support team is there to help your customers manage that change effectively. By prioritizing Customer Support low, you are under valuing the role that they play in supporting and hand holding the users of your products.

Unfortunately the implications of this decision could go deeper than just a damaged relationship between two teams. If the Customer Support team does not have the knowledge to support your products, continuous customer escalations could impact your team’s morale, damage the product’s reputation, and impact schedules as resources are pulled to address various issues. So, perform a risk analysis of your product, and evaluate how challenging it may be for your customers. As optimistic as you are, remember Murphy will be there.

Get to know your extended family

Whether you call them partners or customers, customer support, field engineers, and your sales team are all part of your extended family and, in loose terms, are customers of R&D. They sit between you and your end-customer, managing the day to day relationship, activities and issues. If they don’t believe in your solution and your vision, they will not be able to sell it either.

Take your time. Get to know these partners. Learn to speak their language. Learn how to make them your eager customers, your cheerleaders. Definitely share the power and beauty of your technology and product. However, be ready to do that from their perspective using their language and reflecting on their experiences. Where possible, be ready to walk a mile in their shoes. Be prepared to learn a lot about your end customer through these experiences.

First impressions count

I have been a WordPress user and administrator since I started this site. Over the last few years, the WordPress team have done amazing work to improve the overall administrator experience during upgrades and infrastructure updates. Deployment, installation, upgrades and migrations may not sound sexy, but they go deep into your technology, product and architecture strategy. They also play into first impressions. Compare that to my Microsoft experience, where after 15 minutes of validating, acknowledging and thanking me for having a valid copy of Microsoft XP, the next product that they suggested I install started the exactly same cycle…….. Btw, did you catch Apple’s announcement on Mac OS X Snow Leopard: refined from installation to shutdown. First impressions count!

Make it timely

Documentation seems to be the arch-nemesis of technology developers. Yet, it is one of the time tested methods of knowledge transfer, especially in large corporations and virtual teams. Lack of documentation and support can make or break deals. Recently, I took a 3 week detour as I evaluated using Zope for a prototype idea. After giving my full attention, and trying to work around all the “lack of’s” (lack of working sample code, lack of newbie documentation, lack of knowledge on what functionality maps to which release version…) I moved on to Django. The difference is like night and day.

Knowledge transfer is one of those challenging areas that requires work. It doesn’t happen by itself! So, set up a methodology that makes sense for all parties involved. Establish a process to ensure right knowledge is being captured and communicated in the intended way. It can be as simple as an email snippet, a brown-bag discussion, or as formal as a documentation library managed by a volunteer librarian; i.e. an R&D engineer. Either way, make it work and make it timely.

Move in together

Good customer experience is key to your success. Achieving this can be quite a challenge during the early days of your product and technology. Sometimes you may need to ship your products with dedicated engineers, other times it might make sense to move in with Customer Support to ensure timely customer resolution and effective knowledge transfer. Some of my fond memories are from the time when I moved into a Customer Support team on a temporary assignment. I was leading a small, hand picked R&D team with the task to transition our technology and product knowledge to Customer Support.

This may sound extreme, however if the situation demands, it is the quickest way to turn things around, rebuild damaged relationships and gain internal support for your product and technology. It is important to note that if you are building a transition team, you need to ensure that:

1. You select bright and knowledgeable engineers from the actual pain points; i.e. where customers have issues.
2. You select at least 2 engineers with personality and style (and the ability to stay calm under the most stressful situations) to effectively interface with internal and external customers.
3. Individuals on your team must have good relationships with bigger R&D team, and willingly share their learnings with all.
4. At least a small percentage of the team must work full time to ensure successful transition of knowledge.

Managing the timing, goals and milestones of the transition team is crucial. You cannot afford to be there indefinitely. It is not good for either party. So, set goals and expectations on both sides and be ready to pull the plug if people are not pulling their weight. Needless to say, at the time I wasn’t the most popular person in the R&D organization, but through the work of the transition team we built internal support and established a shared vision.

Immerse yourself in their language

Sometimes closing the gap between R&D and Customer Support might require everyone on the R&D team to become part of Customer Support. Though this may not be the most efficient solution (and also not the most popular), establishing a rotation for R&D escalation support will ensure everyone in your team experiences the challenges and issues that Customer Support sees. If you do choose to go this route, make sure to dedicate an accountable resource to make sense of the constant change; in my case my QA Manager was responsible for managing the rotation.

Though it was painful at times, this process did help my R&D team to have a better understanding of:

1. How our customers were using our products;
2. What major issues our customers were seeing and why;
3. An insight into how the overall product worked (vs. just focusing on their own silos);
4. Building a one-to-one relationships with Customer Support;
5. Ultimately building a better product and technology platform.

In conclusion

Through experience, one can learn a lot about what not to do…. Innovation is a system, and it needs to be managed as such.

Technorati Tags: Customer Support, innovation customer gaps, knowledge transfer

The Nokia Siemens Networks has created an extremely well produced website and video series, entitled “Round. The World. Connected.” that sets out to understand what connectivity means to different people and cultures across Europe, Asia and the Americas. The project focuses specifically on how the latest communications technologies are touching peoples lives and on the socio-economic impact of connectivity.

Also, make sure to check out Futures of Learning for their research insights around the world covering everything from mobile phones to social media. 

Futures of Learning is a collective blog dedicated to the topic of new media and learning. The members of the blog are part of a project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, that is conducting an international survey of research in the field. We are focusing on two areas. One is an international review of research on how people are adopting digital and networked media. The second area is a review of learning institutions that are incorporating new media in innovative ways. We welcome suggestions for literature and programs that we should be looking at!