Knowledge Management

Products - Knowledge Management

For every product that is successfully introduced in today's demanding market conditions, thousands of products fall by the wayside. Yet it is these setbacks that often lead to simply brilliant products that are built through time-tested methods that parse through success-failure-success cycles. The auto industry for example, introduced side air bags - Why ??? It is only because frontal air bags were just not enough even  though years of crash testing appeared to suggest that two airbags were 'enough'. Today one cannot be content with just the look-and-feel improvements that are happening in product development form Client/Server to Web 2.0 and beyond. Just look at today's browsers - they are all two dimensional and tommorow they will be obsolete because someone out there is thinking there has to be a better way to browse the new universe instead of constantly sliding vertical scroll bars and clicking buttons.

Beyond the GUI focused priorities of today's high velocity applications, there must be substantial ease of use, complete process fulfillment, and visible functional and aesthetic improvements if a product is going to succeed. Mere one-to-one re-engineering of legacy products are destined to be simply rejected by today's demanding customers who have more choices than ever before. Why would you chose an application that still requires fifteen key strokes to complete a web transaction when you have another product that can do it in three clicks ? Surely your competitors are working on improving the very products you introduced yesterday. And they are certainly going to make their product a lot easier and cheaper to use while you spend millions writing 'user manuals' because your software is so complex.

All software today can be broken up into simpler components - so that the illusion of 'complex software' remains only in the minds of yesterday's owners of these products. If software is too complex for the ordinary user to use today, it will fail even faster than you think.. Failure to recognize this at the design stage would result in instant product failure and all that would remain would be a pile of user manuals in the ashes. The alternative is to focus on ergonomic simplicity and reliability with longevity brought about by small constant refinements every so often - like tuning a jet engine after 10,000 hours of minimum flying time. Enter the world of resuable component based software enhancement.