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"Wrench
in the System: What's
Sabotaging Your Business Software
and How You Can Release the Power to Innovate" by
Harold Hambrose
; Wiley (272 pages,
$45
)
———
Try this:
Go to the Web site of the federal
Bureau of Labor Statistics
— www.bls.gov — and
find unemployment figures for
Upper Darby, Pa.
Easy?
Not. The numbers are there; the site is a treasure
trove. But chances are you'll get bogged down in screen
after screen of forms and codes that could choke a
macroeconomist.
This
isn't to pick on the bureau, but to say huzzah to the
message in
Harold Hambrose's
"Wrench in the System." Technologists do the
heavy lifting on most business software, and, as
Hambrose explains, "a technologist's first loyalty
is to the code, not the customer." The Dilbert
comic strip has been making that point for a long time.
"Wrench"
is an entertaining argument for a much greater role for
designers, psychologists, even anthropologists in
creating the complex and all-too-frequently bewildering
software used by businesses.
It
shouldn't surprise that author Hambrose is a design
consultant, founder and chief executive officer of the
Philadelphia
design firm Electronic Ink.
The bone
— or wrench — he has to pick with the software
industry generally, and business software in particular,
is that programmers and technologists unwittingly
sabotage their wizardly computer code and cool hardware
by failing to factor in, or even consult, we the people
who'll be clackety-clacking at keyboards and trying to
make sense of what we've been handed.
It is as
if no one had bothered to ask, "What does this
thing need to do?" writes Hambrose.
Look at
your own workspace, or your office neighbor's. Hambrose
says that if the computer screen and desk are littered
with Post-it notes and cheat sheets of password
reminders, keystroke combinations, emergency procedures
and such, you're likely a victim of software that
skipped any meaningful prototype stage on its way to
your desktop.
Unlike
many other large-scale efforts — say, construction of
Manhattan's
Chrysler
building, or production of the first model of the luxury
Lexus automobile — when it comes to software, serious
thought about how it looks or how people will use it can
remain an afterthought, if that.
Everybody's
forgetting to draw up a blueprint, according to Hambrose.
Maybe
that's why a generation of Windows users had to click on
"start" to shut off the computer. At my desk,
you won't intuitively "print" from several of
the programs furnished by global software giants that
should know better. One program menu requires me to know
that "proof object" means to print. Another
calls on me to find and press the "simulate
button" as a precursor to printing.
"Perhaps
no reflection of our nature could be more distorted than
one projected by a typical computer system,"
Hambrose writes.
Hambrose
tells how he and a colleague, with 20 years' experience
between them in the use of Microsoft Word, struggled for
hours to format a graphic into a presentation due to a
client worth possibly millions of dollars in new
business.
They
certainly aren't alone. Last summer, my wife felt
punished to tears during a college course on the
feature-laden Office suite from
Microsoft
, with its 10-ton toolbars.
That's a
personal aggravation. Businesses waste millions to buy,
install, and upgrade software that is either underused
or ignored. Implementation costs, writes Hambrose, can
run to twice the purchase price of software itself. On
top of that, there's lost worker time and productivity
as employees try to do their jobs despite glitches,
jury-rigged workarounds, and frequent calls to the help
desk.
This
should not be, writes Hambrose, whose company has
revamped public and private Web interfaces, such as one
for Traffic.com, as well as a front end for the data
warehouse at
Philadelphia's
Rohm
& Haas, and the look and feel of the big-screen,
war-room-style software used by the
Valley Forge
-based
PJM Interconnection
to monitor the real-time flow of electricity in the grid
serving 13 states.
Innovation,
he writes, "is the difference between asking what
needs to be done and asking how it might be done
better."
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