Some of the ideas I like to float around are:
IT as a commodity – or, more accurately, those off-the-shelf commodity products, the everyday ho-hum basic tools and utilities that we now take for granted, that are ubiquitous, un-sensational, cheap and simple
Design of the way that the resulting solution will satisfy its intended purpose and usage being given far greater emphasis, and being brought in early on in the project
Interaction design/usability/user experience being recognised as a critical attribute of a product or service
Reversing the tendency to skimp on the ‘nice-to-haves’: how often does a project defer the little features that actually make the user experience of the solution so much better because they aren’t crucial, seem trivial, could be done later etc. After all – we’ve got some extremely complicated gadgetry to build first… Intead, spend as little as you can on the gadgets but make them sing by delivering every bit of finesse. If you leave part of the process out in the cold and the customer faced with a manual work-around, you haven’t supported the end-to-end process and you have an incomplete solution.
Stitching these ideas together to conceive of elegant solutions that provide a superb level of fit to the business/customer objective, in a highly usable way, while being composed of simple ‘commodity’ components. It’s the understanding of the problem (people, activities, goals, objectives, and process) and the design that makes a great solution. It’s about a shift in emphasis from the ‘application’ to the design of the end-to-end solution. It de-emphasises technology and stresses interaction design, and effective, elegant composition of simple, commodity parts.
