Analytic Design Group

In 2008 I led a large intranet implementation project where the senior sponsors demanded that there be a governance plan developed. But when asked what governance meant, they were mostly interested in making sure that content was updated and that there be some form of oversight to ensure that business units were using the same platform for sharing information. Governance was more about who owns what and making sure everyone plays well with others.

One of the main attributes of the design work we at ADGi do (and when I say design I mean interaction design and information architecture, not so much visual design) is that all of it is evidence-based. That is, all of it, and I really mean all of it, every interaction, every node in the site map, is driven out of user research and expert analysis. I also insist that the designers who work here can articulate what the evidence or expert analysis is that led them to making the design decision they did.

In November I was lucky enough to be invited by my boss Karyn to go with her and Carol, our Senior Account Strategist, to a morning program offered through the Entrepreneurs Organization, called “Harvard Mini Business Program – Service Excellence Your Competitive Advantage”.

The On Demand Books ‘Espresso’ machine, that prints out a fully bound book in minutes, seems much in the news lately.

Around the time Alan Cooper was giving his really great talk An Insurgency of Quality at this year’s IxDA, I was giving a talk that came to some of the same conclusions from a different starting point.

Lately stories and storytelling have become a bit of a theme around ADGi. It started a couple of months ago with me noting that a company we were doing some business with referred Very Often to their “story” as in “we have a great story to tell about our SharePoint implementation services” or “I met with those guys and didn’t like their story.”

In the last few months I’ve been forced to negotiate far more and for many more things than ever before in my life. I’ve discovered that I hate it. Really. It’s so hard. I’ve also discovered that I’m not alone. In their book Women Don't Ask: The High Cost of Avoiding Negotiation--and Positive Strategies for Change , Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever explain the primary differences in the way women and men approach negotiations.

Three weeks ago I was at CANUX 07 listening to David Armano’s talk, The Fuzzy Tail, where he described an approach to fostering collaboration and innovation at Critical Mass.. His approach to achieving collaboration and innovation is to combine a hierarchical structure with a collaborative model.