The Workplace Blog

Now here’s an article that I wish I had written. In “The Enterprise Gets Googled” CIO magazine discusses how Google is slowly and steadily deepening its presence within the enterprise. From its search appliances which seem to grow new features everyday to beta testing gmail in college environments and the possibility of taking Blogger, Talk and Orkut into the enterprise, Google seems ready to enter IT departments in every Fortune 1000 company.

But enough on the hyperbole, more importantly than the potential of Google succeeding in the enterprise are the Google philosophies that are changing the way large organizations think about application development and delivery. Thanks to companies like Google and Amazon, CIOs are forced to design, build and launch far more usable, feature rich and end user centric applications.

As Dave Girouard, Google Enterprise General Manager said, ” That’s a major shift in the way IT departments operate, but “CIOs need to be OK with some chaos, They’re too concerned with security and locking information down, but those aren’t the things that will make a company great for the next 20 years.

For some reason, I rarely read Jakob Nielsen these days. I’m not sure if it is because I find his writing geared more towards people who are less familiar with user experience and usability or because he generally speaks only at the interface level ignoring information architecture, information design, interaction design and of course everything on the technology side.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I stumbled upon his latest alertbox article on Corporate Usability Maturity. In a two part series, he explains how organizations go through an evolutionary process with regards to their usability practices. They start out as Hostility Toward Usability (stage 1) and mature through the stages till they reach Dedicated Usability Budget (Stage 4) and finally till they become a User-Driven Corporation (Stage 8). I find these stages particularly appealing because they accurately reflect the different stages that I’ve seen companies at.

I also liked the structure for depicting usability maturity - it’s one that we’ve used in the Intranet Maturity Framework. Expect to see us highlight the proprietary framework quite a bit in the near future.

We’ve all been talking about service oriented architectures and XML for a number of years now. We’ve also begun to talk about Web 2.0 which is primarily about connecting people to people versus applications to databases. It nearly seems as if one buzz word has been retired while the other is just beginning to have its 15 minutes of fame. But what do these words really mean and how do they relate to each other? Fortunately, we have John Hagel over at Edge Perspectives\ to help us navigate this mess. Read his post about SOA, XML, Web 2.0 and the cultural chasm separating these communities.