November 2006 Archives

I like to walk. I like to especially walk through the UP Campus. Although the architecture is eclectic, the landscaping has been carefully planned and tended. And, there are some places that show a larger view of planning than just for a single building.

Walk through West Halls from north to south and notice how the buildings in West Halls and the Mineral Sciences Building blend so well and are so pleaseing to the eye. The same is true for the newly created area with the Business Building, Forest Resources and Food Science.

One aspect of our campus development that has often puzzled me is where we choose to build sidewalks and pedestrian walkways. So often it seems the location was chosen by the developers following accepted logic. Sidewalks parallel streets and enter buildings at right angles to the building or the street. It makes sense on paper but how often have you seen unplanned paths created by students, faculty and staff who use different logic for where they want to walk. The shortest, the easiest, the most direct paths are chosen by those who actually walk.

We are learning. The new area surrounding the Business Bulding and the Food Science Building have more diagonal walkways, walks that curve and that enter buildings from multiple directions.

I wonder - do we have the same problem in designing our applications and services as the master planners have had? Do we allow our customers to help us design or do we know best? To help answer this, I've just started a new book,
Outside Innovation: How Your Customers Will Co-Design Your Company's Future, by Patricial B. Seybold. There is a short review in the Nov. 18th edition of The Economist.

She argues that most companies (or central IT organizations) make two mistakes about their customers. One is that innovation has to be driven by the internal visionaries since customers lack an understanding of the possible, and the second is that we do a good job of getting customer feedback so we know what they want.

With increasing use of open-source software, the ability to combine existing services to create a new service, and the increasing availability of faster networking, how should we develop new services? How can we best support our students? How do we best support our faculty and researchers?

I'll write more after I finish her book.