Executive corner
from CCR2, Issue 9 - 2005
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Featured executive:
Helen McKinstry
Director of Development Transformation, Operations and Total Quality Management |
Examining our products through the eyes of our clients
Engaging with you, our clients, is a passion of mine. And to that end, I'd like to use this forum to share with you what we're doing to bring our entire development process closer to the actual client experience. The resulting IBM Tivoli products are designed to meet the needs of the most sophisticated IT environments.
As part of our proactive effort to increase the "consumability" of our products — making them easier to install, configure, deploy and maintain — we've launched some incredibly exciting development initiatives that are helping us focus on how you actually use our products to meet your business goals.
An "outside in" approach to development
Across IBM, and specifically within IBM Tivoli, we've developed a fresh approach to managing consumability, adopting what we call an "outside in" view. This methodology greatly enhances our product design activities as we take the perspective of the client and understand how the product is used to solve business problems and accomplish business tasks — that is, we design our software from the outside in.
Outside-In Design takes us beyond a simple feature/function perspective. Instead, it examines how our products come together to form end-to-end solutions being used throughout our clients' entire systems, and the overall business purposes these solutions need to serve.
Past focuses on user-centered design tended to focus on the user interface. Outside-In Design augments our design approach to span everything from the base architectural decisions to the user experience. By examining scenarios based on our clients' business environments, we are moving the focus on the offering or solution behavior to the beginning of our design processes. And because solutions often require multiple products, these scenarios help us focus on integration issues as well. Having such insight early in the design process ultimately makes our products more relevant to our clients' needs.
How do we gain this insight? We work closely with clients like you, conducting individual interviews with both users and stakeholders, getting to know your processes and environments in detail. We use the information we learn from you to develop roles, goals, scenarios and success criteria for the solutions our products must address. Utilizing this client-specific knowledge as we build our offerings helps ensure our products are especially suited to the heterogeneous IT environments you have today.
A recent example is the work we are doing for the Availability Management Process Manager, part of our new IT service management strategy. We are working closely with clients from a wide range of industry segments — financial, retail, healthcare, telecom, service provider, manufacturing and others. As a result of the feedback gained through those relationships, IBM Tivoli is designing software that helps clients automate the integration of key IT service management processes.
Testing with patterned client configurations
We're also incorporating that same "outside in" approach in our testing. We replicate the business scenarios defined early in the design process into our test processes, incorporating complexity patterned after your environments.
For example, we worked closely with a travel industry client who was using several of our IBM Tivoli products together to manage their internal infrastructure. This particular customer was running their infrastructure on new, very powerful, multiprocessor hardware with very large data sets, using one of our IBM Tivoli products in a highly customized manner. To better ensure that our testing captured the demands and scenarios of their environment, we created an environment inside of IBM patterned from this and similar customers so that we could exercise the functionality in a realistic way that would directly relate to how that client — and many others with similar challenges — actually uses our products.
IBM as its own client
IBM Tivoli is a large enterprise just like many of our clients and, along with all of you, we're always looking for ways to increase our own efficiency. In fact, we're wrapping up some pilot programs using IBM Tivoli Provisioning Manager (TPM) to automate more of our testing and IBM Tivoli Security Compliance Manager (SCM) to more efficiently manage and maintain internal security compliance. The results are reduced labor costs and higher reliability in the replication of our test environments and in our compliance reporting.
There's so much going on, and we're excited about what it means for our clients. We're putting a lot of resources and creative energy behind these development initiatives to make sure we're giving you exactly what you need to achieve your business goals.
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