Bringing in all the Stakeholders
by Bill Ives
Paula Thornton recently posted a nice piece on this blog, Application Development 2.0. She wrote. “…developers do what we as designers have already been doing for over a decade, share in our design problems. It’s not design by committee, but informed design with the benefit of a collective of experiences. It’s the productivity reality check that turns ’stealing from others’ into open sharing (you can’t really steal what’s already there for the taking). Now, let employees in on the evolution of the product and we completely change the AD model.”
I think this is another example of how Web 2.0 is encouraging good practices that have been around for a while. In the early 90s it seemed good sense to us to include in the design and development process everyone who had a stake in the outcome of an application. I am sure this was not new then but it was not often practiced. In one project for an insurance company, we thought about getting baseball caps with “software developer” for the underwriters and claims agents who assisted with the design on new applications they would be using. These future users got very excited and invested in these applications. In the past they saw their IT applications as a top down requirement imposed by the central office for its own record keeping and avoided them whenever possible. Now they were pleased to see someone interested in their needs and had a lot to say. They also promoted the use of the new applications to their colleagues.
Enterprise 2.0 gives us better tools to accomplish this same collaborative design and development approach. As Paula wrote, nothing new here, but the tools help to both build in these good practices and help to further facilitate them.
