Customer-Focused Community Source: Concepts and Processes

Customer-Focused Community Source: Concepts and Processes
Mark Notess, Development Manager
UITS/Digital Library Program, Indiana University

Customer Focus
What is it?
Why do it?
How can we do it?
July 2009
2
10th Sakai Conference - Boston, MA, U.S.A.

What is customer focus?
The answer would seem obvious, but…
July 2009
3

What is Customer Focus?
1. We have met the customers and they are not us.
July 2009
4
Imagine a copyrighted image of Pogo sitting here, saying, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Next Bench

Who are our customers?
July 2009
5
CIO
IT Staff
Support
Other Staff
Instructional Design/Consulting
Librarians
Faculty A
Student A
Faculty B
Student B
Faculty C
Student C
Etc…

How Do We Differ?
July 2009
6

We have met the customers and they are not us.
We are committed to customer success.
July 2009
7

We plan, design, and deliver activity enablers rather than just technology.
July 2009
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Two Worlds
tool
object
subject
outcome
division of labor
community
rules
Systems have a way to “think” about themselves—data structures, algorithms, application programming interfaces
Users and organizations have ways of accomplishing work, whether tacit or explicit, whether documented or informal—tasks, roles, attitudes, knowledge, habits, etc.
Structure of computer activity
Structure of human activity

Enabling Activity
JSR 168
OKI
IMS
How do I …?
What just happened?
≠
The way computers need to think about themselves is very different from how people need to think about their work.

About Sakai, c. 2004
The University of Michigan, Indiana University, MIT, Stanford, and the uPortal consortium are joining forces to integrate and synchronize their considerable educational software into a pre-integrated collection of open source tools. This will yield three big wins for sustainable economics and innovation in higher education:
* A framework that builds on the recently ratified JSR 168 portlet standard and the OKI open service interface definitions to create a services-based, enterprise portal for tool delivery
* A re-factored set of educational software tools that blends the best of features from the participants’ disparate software (e.g., course management systems, assessment tools, workflow, etc.)
* A synchronization of the institutional clocks of these schools in developing, adopting and using a common set of open source software.
(thanks to the Internet Archive Web Wayback Machine)
July 2009
11

About Sakai Today
The Sakai CLE is a free and open source Courseware Management System. It features a set of software tools designed to help instructors, researchers and students collaborate online in support of their work--whether it be course instruction, research or general project collaboration.
For coursework, Sakai provides features to supplement and enhance teaching and learning. For collaboration, Sakai has tools to help organize communication and collaborative work on campus and around the world. Using a web browser, users choose from Sakai's tools to create a site that meets their needs. To use Sakai, no knowledge of HTML is necessary.
But the product vision reaches beyond teaching and learning applications. Many Sakai deployments include as many or more project and research collaboration sites. In addition, the Open Source Portfolio e-Portfolio system is a core part of the Sakai software. Finally, the Sakaibrary project links library resources to Sakai. You can try Sakai for yourself by downloading and installing the demonstration or by visiting one the sites of our Commercial Affiliates, several of which have test drives of Sakai where you can simply create your own account. No installation necessary.
(from sakaiproject.org, 3 July 2009)
July 2009
12

Our understanding is open to constant revision.
We recognize and seek out requirements variability across time as well as across types of users and uses
We recognize the difference between user needs and their many proxies, and work towards high-quality proxying
We recognize the richness of contextual details and their impact
July 2009
13

Proxying Phenomenon
July 2009
14
What the customer asked for
How we understood what the customer asked for
What the customer really needed

Proxying Phenomenon
July 2009
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?
Developer
Customer needs
Jira ticket
Institutional Sakai rep
Institutional requirements committee
My memories
PROXIES
Survey results
Competing or similar product
Focus group rankings
Use Case
Persona

A Fictional Proxying Example
July 2009
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Tacitness of Work Knowledge
July 2009
17
What people know about what they know and do
What people don’t know about what they know and do
How well does our requirements process work under water?

Self-Report Reliability
July 2009
18
Elliot, R., & Jankel-Elliot, N. (2003). Using ethnography in strategic consumer research. Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal , 6 (4) 215-223.

Discovering User Needs
make it up—we’re smart!
I am the user!
ask those who know users
ask early adopters
ask users what they like or want
Designer
ask users what they do
competitive
analysis
ask users what they did
read pubs
Bb
study real artifacts & data
Moodle
users
watch users work & discuss

Contextual Inquiry
ask users what they did
study real artifacts & data
Designer
watch users work & discuss
users

Our understanding is open to constant revision.
We own the full customer experience and constantly improve it.
“Dive for the ball” mentality – potentially harder in a non-hierarchical, somewhat volunteer organization like Sakai community
Full experience: tryout, evaluation, adoption, planning, implementation, support, maintenance, …
Product vision: a designer’s job. Don’t ask customers to be designers.
July 2009
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Why be customer focused?
Is it really necessary?
July 2009
22

Customer Focus is Hard
Customer focus requires bridging technology and human activity
As technologists, our expertise, focus, and often our interest is in the technology itself
“Work practice”—where real requirements live—is a hard place to visit
Technology organizations always risk becoming technology focused
Our training as technologists seldom addresses how to uncover hidden customer needs

But It Beats the Alternatives
Technology focused
Internally focused
Unfocused
Customer driven
July 2009
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Risks to Sakai
We could lose the critical mass needed for sustainability
We could waste resources doing things that don’t matter, that people don’t use
And, most important to me,
When usage is required, we force people to experience unpleasantness
July 2009
25

How can we be/stay customer focused?
A few suggestions …
July 2009
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Five Suggestions
Ground requirements in real data via contextual inquiry and high-fidelity proxying
Privilege data from those less like us: dissenting voices, students and faculty from non-technical disciplines, laggards
Invite ethnographic, qualitative, or design research classes at your institutions to do projects that enrich our customer understanding
Supplement personas with “coursonas” or other activity-based representations
Figure out how new members become enculturated in Sakai and make sure a shared understanding of customer work practice is part of the experience
July 2009
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Coursona Example
2a. The Technology Semi-Distance Groupshop
Focus on learning and applying a technology-related process in group projects
Intensive technical, procedural work with a parallel focus on how to work in (possibly distributed) teams
Course content is technical, and some students are remote making it convenient and necessary to use technology for course management (slide sharing; podcasting; online group sessions, discussions, and filespaces)
Examples: Instructional technology design course
(For more examples from last year’s talk, google “notesscoursonasakai”)

Process Alone Won’t Do It
July 2009
29
Communication
Process
Predispositions
People

Discussion
Other elements of customer focus?
Is customer focus important for Sakai?
How are we doing? How could we improve?
July 2009
30

Customer-Focused Community Source: Concepts and Processes

by Mark Notess on Jul 08, 2009

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Customer-Focused Community Source: Concepts and Processes — Presentation Transcript