Sunday, December 20, 2015

My Review of "X: The Experience When Business Meets Design ."

5 out of 5 stars....

X: The Experience When Business Meets Design takes the reader into a step by step process to understand how businesses should develop or transform their brand to equate to an experience, rather than just performing a function. Welcome to the Experience Economy. Coca Cola was one of the first to successfully embody it, by tailoring its ads not to just being a carbonated beverage, but associating it with fun and happiness. Think, too, of Disney taking one on a fantasy trip and Disneyland being the "happiest place on earth." The ultimate, as the book infers, being Steve Jobs and Apple, where art and technology intersect to bring customers to need functions they never before thought they needed or wanted.

It details an Experience Architecture when the customer shares the experience with the brand, Coke and Nike being examples. It is important to get into the user's point of view, to emphasize. It is also important to discard legacy philosophies and visualize the experience. We are now in a digital world and as Banksy might think, digital graffiti.

And the book explains that the customer experience is not linear, but a collection of moments
of truth, it calls ZMOT, FMOT, SMOT and UMOT....the bottom line being it is complicated

This complexity can create a Circle of Rife within a company, basically a soloing of opinions
The book quotes Leo Tolstoy, "Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one wants to change
himself," as wise to ponder to overcome this problem. So, the team must "think differently," then come up with a plan. Further, this plan should be broken into "grids." This visualization will lead to an omnichannel design, several points in grids leading to desining how to fully understand the customer. The challenge for a company, being to move from managing to designing, a collaborative process, the book breaks down as 3Ds, evolving to a human centered design, it calls UCX, user centered experience, and eventually gets to UX, human experience. It really is about people and p2p, people communicating with people. The book even brings up some futuristic films, specifically, Inception, where dreams of one person are implanted in another person to let that person build on the creativity of the previous person. This collaborative designing is similar, cross breeding of ideas. The author also advocates having an anthropologist on the team to ensure the design focuses on humans using the latest understandings.

So human centered, that the process should come up with a story, amplified visually with storyboards.

I recommend the book, an easy read for a reader just interested to learn what the Experience Economy is, a more intensive read for a reader wanting to implement it at their company.


Sunday, December 06, 2015

My Review of "Inflection Point"

5 out of 5 stars....

This book discusses the intersection of Big Data, the Cloud and Mobility and how it represents not just a new trend or an incremental step in technology, but an "Inflection Point," such that it makes nearly all businesses obsolete unless they transform their IT immediately.

Basically, computers and software should be seen as a utility service, provided by another company that has as its core competency, providing and maintaining such systems for a reasonable periodic service fee. Then, the company should stick to its core competencies. so, no need for its own data center, computers, existing software and staff to manage updates.

Also part of this inflection point are Apps. The internet is now really a collection of applications, such that one could start a new business in a short time without prior knowledge, using Apps. So, incremental will not work now, since competition can now develop and improve super fast. A key word now is disintermediation. massive loss of jobs, basically because of elimination of middlemen.

This SaaS (software as a service) and the disintermediation resulting is amplified with the Internet of Things with machines communicating with machines via the Cloud, bypassing the need for additional jobs, and steps for ordinary humans outside the workplace.

The book also addresses how one can better evaluate stocks for their personal portfolio, considering the above. The popular metric of EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) is worthless because now, this excludes the very things which could make the company uncompetitive in this new environment. Instead, ROIC (return on invested capital), is perhaps now the premier metric to be used, along with cash flow.

Also, the book covers MDM (mobile device management), very important to let company employees use their own mobile device, maybe only just partially subsidized by the company since it also can be used for personal stuff. The key being simplicity.

The book also mentions mobile middleware,which allows Apps to communicate with Apps.

The beauty of this book is how it ties together these very important concepts in such a neat way, making an easy and fast reading book. I heartily recommend it.