Creative Destruction Coming Soon (or not so soon), To Your Mailbox

My suspicion is when email was invented some thirty-odd years ago I suspect its invetor didn't think to him or herself - 'Wow! This is fantastic! I imagine this will render the post office largely useless, and put hundreds of thousands of postal workers out on the street!'

Rather, once the usefulness of email began to be sensed, and it started to gain traction, eventually becoming the most incredible and powerful communications technology ever invented, its creators must have felt justifiably proud and encouraged by their brainchild. Email, and other web-powered technologies, have certainly helped to usher in the new, connected age. Email, as the first and still largest social network has enabled the type of connection, collaboration, and information sharing that would have been unfathomable only a few decades ago.

And for the better part of its trajectory as a tool, email has generally been seen as beneficial and certainly today, necessary for the successful conduct of commerce, education, and even in the Facebook age, socialization. Don't argue with me on that last point, how many of you get your Facebook notifications as email messages?

So while email has again generally been the 'killer app' of the last few decades, as I alluded to in the opening paragraph of this post, not all the changes brought about by email, (and more generally the connected, information age), have been so positive. And no, highly-paid professionals whining about the hundreds of unread messages in their Inbox is not what I'm talking about. If you're complainging about unopened emails to anyone, well then, you need to shut it. Talk to me when you have some real problems.

Like, by manner of transition, the problems soon to be encountered by potentially tens if not hundreds of thousands of US Postal Workers. Certainly you've heard about the financial troubles facing the US Postal Service? Massive deficit, declining demand for their services, and a public seemingly not all that sympathetic to their plight. As this piece on CNN.com point out, people are sending 22% fewer pieces of mail than just four years ago, and according to the author, this drop in volume is largely due to email and other forms of electronic communication replacing traditional mail.

The decrease in volume, (and for most of us customers), decline in importance of the traditional postal service is not all that surprising I guess. That's what 'progress' is after all, right? Smart men and women, (and in this modern age even kids), creating, combining, extending inventions and technologies that improve processes, create new and fantastic ways of generating value, and often, make our lives better, richer, and more fulfilling. And despite the whiny cries of spoiled adults, email has been one of those technologies. Most of us can't imagine a world without it. 

But the demise of the post office and the postal service, and the likely redundancies of many, many thousands of good people still to come at least to me is really kind of sad.

For untold millions of Americans, their connection to the world beyond their immediate neighborhoods and towns was solely facilitated by the postal service. Long before nervous parents could get an email or even a Skype call from a son or daughter away at college, or worse, off fighting in a war in some distant land, there was the letter home, and the anxious moments watching the postman approaching the door while thinking, 'Today's the day. I'm sure we'll hear something today'.

That anticipation, and the disappointment that often accompanied a delivery of nothing but bills or junk mail is largely a fading memory, (or a 'never-experienced' memory if there is such a thing), for most.

Soon, the postal service will stop Saturday delivery. Then maybe they will drop Fridays, and they'll consider raising the prices of first-class mail, and close lots of local offices and distribution centers - but some would say it is all, already too late. Email, and the nine million other ways people and organizations can communicate that usurp the postal service show no signs of loosening their collective death grip around the postal service's throat.

But it has been a pretty amazing run. For a few cents really, even still today, you can drop a card or letter in a small blue metal box, anywhere in the country, and someone in a blue uniform will pick it up for you and after some under-the-covers magic happens, someone else in a blue uniform will hand deliver it  anywhere in the United States. In just a couple of days. For just a few cents.

It is still, to me, a remarkable illustration of organization, process efficiency, and yes - even technology.

Better take advantage of it while you still can. And start explaining to Grandma how she might not to be able to send the Grandkids their Hallmark Cards with the $10 bill in them for very much longer.

Used as Delivered: Why Grandma's VCR was always blinking 12:00

One of the best features of most modern technologies, whether designed for use inside the enterprise, or for consumer or leisure time pursuits, is the flexibility, adaptability, and personalization capability of these solutions or devices.

Software programs are usually almost infinitely customizable - with a myriad of settings and options that users can manipulate and alter to suit their unique needs. Newer gadgets like smartphones and tablets are replete with their own sets of menu and option settings, and the applications and programs we load onto these devices typically come with their own options and opportunities for us the users to shape the behavior and functionality of these applications to meet our needs. Choice - and the ability to form, create, and adapt our computing and technological environments to our precise needs has never been more within our grasp.

In fact, particularly in software solutions designed for and sold to enterprise and corporate users, this ability to 'shape' or personalize the technology to meet company, work function, and even individual needs is quite often touted as one of the most attractive and beneficial features of the solution.

Certainly, enterprise software companies can't predict and thus design for all the potential differences and nuances in organizational processes, practices, and preferences; thus by building in the capability for end users to maintain some control of the operation and interface of said software solutions, they can offer the benefits of almost custom or bespoke applications, but still with the reliability, structure, and process discipline of good enterprise software.

But does all this flexibility and personalization capability in both enterprise and consumer technologies and devices really get exploited by the majority of end users to tailor their experiences, and be extension, improve the utility of these solutions and gadgets? Well chances are, not so much. Check some of the observations about software users and default settings from a study of Microsoft Word users on the User Interface Engineering blog:

We asked a ton of people to send us their settings file for Microsoft Word. At the time, MS Word stored all the settings in a file named something like config.ini, so we asked people to locate that file on their hard disk and email it to us. Several hundred folks did just that.

We then wrote a program to analyze the files, counting up how many people had changed the 150+ settings in the applications and which settings they had changed.

What we found was really interesting. Less than 5% of the users we surveyed had changed any settings at all. More than 95% had kept the settings in the exact configuration that the program installed in.

This was particularly curious because some of the program’s defaults were notable. For example, the program had a feature that would automatically save your work as edited a document, to prevent losing anything in case of a system or program failure. In the default settings for the version we analyzed, this feature was disabled. Users had to explicitly turn it on to make it work.

Of course, this mean that 95% of the users were running with autosave turned off. When we interviewed a sample of them, they all told us the same thing: They assumed Microsoft had delivered it turned off for a reason, therefore who were they to set it otherwise. “Microsoft must know what they are doing,” several of the participants told us.

I think there is some really useful advice in this little experiment with MS Word users, while building in flexibility and options and choice is certainly important in any modern software solution or new device, those of us involved in building or deploying these kinds of technologies should keep in mind it is likely only a very small minority will leverage the flexibility and personalization features we tout so stridently and spend so much time developing.

While choice, options, and freedom to adapt technology are all necessary components in the modern enterprise and consumer software age, let's not forget there is quite a lot to commend software and hardware solutions that simply work. Turn them on, activate them, answer a few questions in configuration sure - but the sooner solutions can start solving business problems and delivering positive impact to users, without asking users to morph into armchair software developers is really the hallmark of a great solution.

So I'll toss the question out to the readers - how important is flexibililty and personalization in your technologies and how important is it to you for them to simply work right away?

Please submit your resume, three references, and a facial scan

For recruiters and Human Resources professionals sorting through mountains of applicant resumes, conducting and reviewing scores of interviews, checking references, and doing the requisite online social media stalking research, of candidates; hiring is a lengthy, challenging, and certainly inexact science.Source - PLoS One

Sure, over time and with experience professional recruiters and HR gurus can and do certainly get better at managing these processes (and the right technologies implemented in a smart manner definitely can help), but even with years of practice and refinement, the hiring process itself can still resemble a long, slow, dreary march, filled with mostly sequential and incremental steps meant to answer a fairly basic question - 'Is this the kind of person we want to work with?'.

What if there was a way not necessarily to usurp these processes to drive to the answer to that question, but to supplement or attempt to confirm the conclusions drawn from the interview processes with a little bit of technology and science that claims to offer an accurate assessment of a person's basic character elements, without being beguiled or influenced by factors that can possibly be more easily manipulated by the candidate?

Take a look at this piece from the CNET - 'Software can tell if you're mean and ugly', a piece that describes a new kind of facial recognition software that claims that 'using machine-learning techniques, it also examines images of faces for other social traits, such as competence, trustworthiness, meanness, dominance, and extroversion.'

Competence? Trustworthiness? Meanness? 

Those sound like the kinds of traits that might have plenty to do with success on the job and the assessment of these traits is in large part what the recruiting and hiring processes are designed to determine. Could a simple facial scan when processed by this new software actually drive a better, more accurate, and quicker understanding of these critical personality factors?

According to the CNET piece the software claims to have achieved between 91 and 96 percent accuracy for at least three traits - dominance, threat, and meanness. 

Now before you go crazy in the comments about all the legal and ethical problems with incorporating a crazy technology like facial recognition scanning in the hiring process, I will be clear in stating that I don't think this kind of technology has a place (at least right now), in any candidate assessment process.  But the technology is kind of interesting, and it might just have other applications we have not thought of as yet.

And it also helps to point out that despite all the time, effort, and application of years of experience that we bring to bear on the hiring process, sometimes the best way to get a bead on someone is to just look them straight in the eye, (and also assess their shape, alignment, and equidistance).

What do you think - will this kind of technology ever have a place in the recruiting process?

New Technology and Staying Relevant

Technology, whether its in the workplace or in our personal lives, advances relentlessly, and it can be really daunting and perhaps frustrating for some to keep up. And of course there's the question of should you even try to stay on top of the latest developments in things like augmented reality or whether you need to sign up for an account on the newest social/reputation/gaming/location/baconated viral community?

Here's some unsolicited advice that might help you decide whether or not a new shiny object is worth the investment of some of your most valuable resource - your time, and by asking and evaluating your answers to a few basic questions hopefully you'll be better able to make an informed decision.

1. Do I have any idea what this new 'thing' is?

If the new tool or technology is 100% foreign to you, never heard the name before, don't recognize any of the people that might be talking about it, and as yet, can't find anyone with a Twitter bio professing to be a 'ninja' or 'rockstar' with said new technology - then it is safe to take a pass for now. Let some other folks with more time on their hands sort out the relevance and potential use cases for you.

2. Who is reporting about this technology right now?

There is a kind of progression and hierarchy in the popular tech blogs and aggregators, and mainstream media about new technology.  This progression can be roughly used as a layman's guide about when to take a closer look at a new technology or gadget.

Killer Startups.com - Still safe to ignore. 

TechCrunch - Still generally ok to wait it out. I'll keep an eye out for you and let you know if anything that pops there is relevant.  

Mashable - Probably still ok to ignore, but at this point you might need to feign interest as all of your online friends will have read the same information you did and you don't want to seem out of touch.

The New York Times - Now it's time to take a look for sure. In fact it may already be too late.By now the rest of the world now knows about the new technology too. So you won't be 'cool' for talking about it with the Twitter crowd, but inside your own organization you still might be able to pull off some early adopter cred.

Does this technology have anything to do with my job/business/industry?

The directly relevant technologies to your business or industry are generally easy to spot.  They usually have a tagline of 'The Pandora for ABC' or 'The Foursquare of XYZ'. If ABC or XYZ are things your company does or provides, it might be worth your time to take a closer look. That is assuming of course you know what Pandora and Foursquare are. If you don't then, chasing their imitators might be a waste of energy.

Is this technology/tool/gadget/service the answer to a real problem that anyone that has any influence over my success and happiness needs to have solved?

Your boss. Your customers. Your spouse. What you really want from your investment of time, resources, and possibly money out of a new technology is a way to solve problems. But not really your problems, rather someone else's problems.

Be careful of adopting too many tools or toys that really seem to only benefit you. Sure they can be fun for a while. But you run the risk of ending up like the guy who has spent his life collecting Star Wars figures or PEZ dispensers. You might get some acclaim and (limited) reward from those communities, but do you really want to be known for that? As we'd say in the sports world - that is not tremendous upside potential.

So that's it, a some short guidelines to try and help you to assess that fancy new technology all the cool kids are talking about.

What's your take? How do you decide when to spend time on a new toy?

I want my MTV, I mean my workforce apps

MTV was in the news this week, as the venerable network of 'Video Killed the Radio Star', 'Beavis and Butt-head', and more recently 'Jersey Shore' celebrated its 30th anniversary. Over the 30-year run MTV has certainly changed its focus, direction, and strategy, and as many observers are quick to note, the network doesn't really have that much to do with music anymore as it has long since morphed into a more general entertainment property.

But even noting these changes in MTV's purpose, it was kind of surprising to me when I received an email Press Release pitch with the title - 'Latitude and MTV Networks Uncover the Meaning Behind Our Addiction to Apps', referencing the results of a recent study on mobile application usage conducted by the research firm Latitude on behalf of MTV Networks.  Since (shockingly, I know), I am old enough to remember when MTV was stil about playing bad Journey videos, I had to check out the press release and some of the study's findings about mobile application uptake and the important app value propositions - after all what workplace or HR technology solution is not making a move (or already has arrived), in the mobile and app space?  And as smartphones and tablets are taking over on the consumer side as gateways to the web, there's no doubt the same will (or is already) happening inside the enterprise.

For context here are some details on the purpose and the methodology of the study from the Latitude release:

The study investigated the underlying psychology and current behaviors surrounding app adoption, use, and abandonment for heavy app users, and ultimately uncovered top characteristics and features of a successful app. The study included a round of initial qualitative interviews, a deprivation phase (normal app users were asked to go app-free for three days), and a quantitative survey of more than 1300 app-engaged smartphone owners between the ages of 13 and 64.

So what did the study show the main benefits are of app usage and therefore are the primary drivers of longer-term adoption and reduced the chances of app 'abandonment?', (again, from the Latitude Press Release):

• Apps Create Me Moments: Apps allow intense personalization and hyper-focus, filling our idle moments with “me time” on-demand. This expectation for powerful, instantaneous “me focus” is making its way into desired in-app entertainment and ad experiences. Personal context is king!87% of participants said: “Apps let me have fun no matter where I am or what I’m doing.”

Implication for designers of 'workplace' apps: Smartphones and tablets are really personal devices, much more so than the standard-issue company PC or laptop. Apps therefore need to maintain and leverage this personalization of experience, app users like to see their apps as almost personal tools, and not just extensions of a bland or generic enterprise solution. 

• Apps Make Everyday Life Better: Apps are enhancing our day-to-day experiences directly by enabling productivity, achievement of our personal goals, and so on—and indirectly through the resulting creation of free time, improved mental well-being, opportunities for positive discovery, and more. 

Implication for designers of 'workplace' apps: Sort of obvious, but the main point of emphasis is that the enterprise apps, particularly ones that might be transaction driven, need to do more than just replicate processes typically performed on PCs in corporate systems. They need to make the experience and process better - more efficient, simpler, more enjoyable. If the staff hate the process and the tool while using it in the office, simply porting it to an iPad won't make them feel any better about it. In fact, they might rebel, wondering why they can't seem to escape from it.

• Apps Open Us to New Worlds: Whether it’s learning new languages or gazing at the stars, the possibilities seem endless as apps open people’s imaginations to the new and “magical.” As mobile technology rapidly innovates, people increasingly envision apps as complementing and transforming traditional media experiences into “something new.” 91% of participants said: “Apps expose me to new things.”

Implication for designers of 'workplace' apps: How about approaching your app strategy beyond simply taking what you have in the office and porting it to a mobile app and think about what you can deliver that is brand new? What value can you add to the employee experience that they can only get via your new app? Whether it is new learning content, a tool that mashes up data in your CRM with social web content, or simply a syndicated feed of news and events about your company or industry - consider building something brand new and exclusive to app ecosystem.

What's your take - can the designers and workforce technology experts learn from the MTV crowd?

Or perhaps a better question - will you be watching the retrurn of Beavis and Butt-head to MTV this Fall?