What We Need to Know
Where does innovation come from?
Innovation is the difference between asking what needs to be done and asking how it might be done better.
Unless we take the trouble to investigate the ways in which people use a product, we may replicate its limitations and miss information that would suggest opportunities for innovation. When we observe and study the context in which a product is used, we often find out things that we didn’t expect. Innovation may be something we don’t know we need and don’t know we want until we see it.
Innovative software is driven by partnerships between business, technology, and design in a collaboration that considers the specific ways in which the technology will be used. To produce better software products, we need to provide a clear interpretation of the data that is available to us. To interpret data appropriately, we need to understand the context in which it will be presented. To correctly evaluate its context, we must understand the people who will use the software, and this can be accomplished only by doing research to discover their aptitudes and their needs.
Our present technology offers us a wealth of capabilities to communicate with each other, to conduct our business, to educate, and to entertain. Software gives physicians better, faster ways to analyze diagnostic information, throws open the doors of the greatest museums and libraries of the world, and enables geologists and ecologists to gain a better understanding of the earth’s natural resources, from the oil fields of Alaska to beyond the Great Barrier Reef. But all the data in the world won’t tell us what we need to know unless it’s presented in a form we can use.
The opportunities for innovation that we can achieve through information technology are almost beyond imagining. But if these innovations are to be meaningful, they must be informed by the everyday needs of those of us who use them.
— 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.
