The Wrench on the Front Seat
The information technology available to us is as fast as the speed of light, more powerful than most of us can imagine, and as reliable as the clock ticking in the hall. But this technology doesn’t serve us nearly as well as it could, simply because we do not develop software through processes that genuinely consider those who will use these products. Today, most business software is like so much of our public transportation: uncomfortable and unpredictable, avoided by those who have the means to do so, and tolerated by those without.
My grandfather was a surgeon who was stationed in the American Southwest with the U.S. Army during World War I, and during this time he owned a Model T. When I asked my grandmother what she remembered about that first car—was it the speed, or the freedom of the open road, or was it just the feeling of having the wind in her hair?—she told me that what she remembered most was sitting on the wrench. The car was supplied with a few basic tools, and a wrench was stored on the front passenger seat. She said that the experience that she remembered in that car was sitting on the tools.
My grandmother was something of a snob, and she also said that the car made an auto mechanic of her husband because every so many miles he had to reach underneath the hood and make adjustments with the tools that the manufacturer had supplied to him. This was regarded as normal, part of the responsibility of ownership. It was as if the manufacturer had said, “If you are going to own this technology, you are going to accept these things.”
My grandmother wasn’t hoping for a car that had power windows or an automatic transmission, and she wasn’t expecting the car to talk to her. The only innovation she wanted was not to have the imprint of a wrench on her bottom. She was asking for just a little more comfort.
Furthermore, she didn’t like seeing her husband transformed from respected surgeon to amateur mechanic. This last concern cannot be underestimated, because in making decisions about the things we buy, we’re strongly affected by what these things say about us and how they make us feel. And that’s the level of conversation that you have today whenever you ask people about their experiences with software: The usability of the system is the proverbial wrench under everyone’s bottom.
Clumsy, ineffective software makes everyone who uses it feel uncomfortable. It causes employees to perform poorly, so it gives them a negative impression of their value as workers, and it also makes a company seem unconcerned for its employees and disconnected from the needs, the expectations, and the goals of its customers.
By today’s standards, the Model T was a lemon: hard to start, hard to steer, and often in need of adjustment. But long before the Model T morphed into Mustangs and Explorers, Ford began to design and engineer its products to make them more practical and more appealing to customers. Rather than adding extra padding to the seats or moving the wrench, the manufacturer eliminated the need for a readily accessible tool kit by designing a product that didn’t doesn’t require constant maintenance.
Today we take it for granted that we can start a new car with the flick of a wrist and that it will give us a smooth, quiet ride, keep us warm in winter and cool in summer, bring us the latest news and our favorite music, show us how to reach our destination, and even help protect us in a collision, all without requiring us to do little more than refuel or recharge from time to time and change the oil every few thousand miles.
To design business software that we can use with the same assurance, we need to consider the history of product design and manufacturing. We need to think about how those older processes—those ways of modeling objects to suit the needs of the people who use them—can be applied to the process of building new software and modifying existing systems. Imagining these collections of features and functions to be different from all other consumer goods in the history of commerce has brought us to where we are today: We possess tremendously powerful technology, but our experience with that technology routinely makes us miserable.
— Excerpted from Wrench in the System: What’s sabotaging your business software and how you can release the power to innovate . by Harold Hambrose (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York). Order your copy of this book.
