Software-as-a-Person

We've come a long way in designing software for intuitive approaches to solving problems.  Or, have we?

That is the thought that haunts me.  Fitting, since we're approaching Halloween.  What haunts you as an entrepreneur?  From my experience, I believe most people fear risk and failure - at least that choose the craft of starting a company and building a business.  There is much uncertainty and long hours and family imbalances with time as your enemy and your only controllable resource.  The risk of failure by letting your employees, board, investors, and friends down has to be near the top of haunting omnipresent fears. 

So what do we do?

We focus, become lean and efficient.  Every task is big and swiftly attacked with furious commitment.  Then, we make time for personal life - family, friends, and random social activities.  That is what allows you to remain balanced.

Software doesn't follow this methodology.  Yet, we make our living creating software that perpetuates the offenses against our only possession we cannot replace - time.  Software needs to be quick - almost instantly achieving the outcome.  When's the last time you logged into a CRM app or any enterprise software and got it done in a few clicks.  Whatever 'it' is, it takes some time and processing, workflow and complexity.  Almost always our products commit the felony of requiring custom programming to make the whole thing slightly better for each user, customer or industry.  That wont work longterm.  Think about if someone dislikes the google search query they just ran - then a team of well-paid google engineers were dispatched to the scene to determine your issue.

Now, with the technology movement approaching the "Software-as-a-Person" approach - the person is the most important part of the design and is the main focus of all development user-centric - the UI, the back-end and the speed-to-value quotient. 

This approach will, by its very nature, interrupt all software and HMI and and the underlying software code and process of development, everywhere.

Now, what does that translate to for us, the entrepreneur?

Where is the opportunity to 'get it right' with a IT solution to facilitate the efficient accomplishment to better balance your life, optimize your business and make better decisions faster?  Everyone can play a part.  You should virtualize your world and access and share it to whomever you want - instantly and with style.  That is the reality everyone wants with Human-Computer Interaction. 

Its possible. With the right amount of planning, simplicity in solutions and selection of best practices in implementation you can create a usable framework for scaling user-driven software for your organization. 

Happy Software.

-James

Information is expensive

Think about how much information really costs mission critical users... now take a deep breath and multiply that by 50.  That is over $5 trillion USD in estimated costs of information retrieval, presentation, analysis and intelligence just in the measurable world.  It's the most pervasive power known to all mankind, yet we still are in the stone ages in terms of how we make it truly organized and effectively consumed.

We flurry through documents, trudge through databases and generate reports that are exhaustive.  We read old information and try to trudge through a barrage of distractions.  Then, think about when you get home and the data is everywhere, haphazardly pinned to your fridge, notes on the counter, bills, voicemail and all the email... ugh... its a little overwhelming.

So, fast forward to today.  This is Sitscape.  We made sense of the data.  It's now clean, easily digested, presented in an aggregate common and collaborative atmosphere.  No matter where the data resides, we can roll it up into a dashboard and truly extensible framework that can be shared to anyone.  Security is cut up throughout the entire architecture with real-time integration with active directory and other best practice design.

We have an amazing team lead by creative and very driven founders who are seriously committed to their product and stand behind it with a passion and belief that powers the product in a wonderful process to be a part of.  The agility of our development is created not by rigid frameworks and insistence on a formal development model.  That is what makes it free to evolve quite creatively.  Every day we are realizing the previous day's revelation. The team and organization is gelling and people are organized around a common pursuit with a relative ebb and flow seen very rarely in my experiences across 5 companies, some of which were my own.

The model is creating a lean start-up kind of chaotically productive and very rewarding experience.  The mission of truly socializing the information of businesses, governments, federal and local agencies and municipalities and every industry so far that I have thought of has a defensible use case.  Not only is the time to value unmatched in software, but a customer can save literally millions of dollars or many lives and make better decisions in a few weeks of use of our software and the platform is truly re-usable and extensible and the value will continue to rise in ROI exponentially.  That is powerful.  The power is NxN in the return on investment.

...and that is how technology should improve our lives and the overwhelming cost of dollars and time.

People need to operate more in tune with the notion of real-time on-the-fly and instantly available streams of content and break the mold of navigation insanity.  The time we spend is enormous and irresponsible consuming wasted, static snapshots of stale information.

Information is only expensive when you aren't aware of the way it needs to interact with a user and create a pattern of efficient consumption. 

Information Harmony...

The Summit of Software is the user.

We know our technology is the greatest it has ever been and only improving.  The needs of businesses, users, families and ourselves need technology to operate and thrive.  The investment we've made have created a barrage of mobile, pc and media constantly surrounding us.  We participate, operate and manipulate - searching, playing and analyzing information all the time.  Our brains rely upon tools, applications, databases and websites for knowledge acquisition, decision making, fun and almost anything else...

So when a single tool can make all the technology noise into a soothing harmony of consolidation and ease of use - that seems pretty good to us.  We at Sitscape are attempting to make sense of data, organizing the information instantly on-the-fly to create a atmosphere or operating system able to navigate and consume information easily and dynamically.  Given this nicely organized, collaborative environment, one is inclined to more efficiently interact with information. 

Solving Problems

Software is only as useful as the problems it solves for many people working together to achieve a intended outcome.  So, you naturally have ERP, SCM, CRM, Logistics, and about 15-20 more software programs used within the average business.  Then, you add in the websites, services, feeds, news, and other shared or common sources of information that factor into your daily information consumption patterns and affect your judgements and decisions.  On top of all that, you have to coordinate, collaborate and communicate all this information and your analysis and perspective of the various silo-ed data sources.

When all this happens, out spits a static document, presentation and otherwise stale document that tries to encapsulate, summarize and present the information aggregation and transmit intelligence to others.

This is not OK!

This is not how we want to operate, rather it's been the limitation of our technology that has endangered our ability to actively interact with all the live data we want to see simultaneously, in context.  Why not?  Well, we stay up thinking about solving that problem and are committed to delivering it through innovative information delivery and collaboration solutions.

Contact us today so we can help you make better decisions.

James Dobbs
SitScape, Inc. 
www.Sitscape.com
jdobbs@sitscape.com
703-307-5430