Paving the Well-trodden Path

Tom Austin of Gartner hits on IT policies that don't serve the user (no permalinks on the Gartner blogs, scroll down to the 5/8 entry):

So, for example, we persist in the notion that end users abuse e-mail and store too much there and transport things that should be elsewise transported. So we rail against users, institute draconian quotas and issue "get tough" proclamations (along with "reeducation campaigns"). Meanwhile, IT professionals are often the worst offenders. Why? Well, because our proclamations are wrong.

Consider the town green with a few paved foot paths. They're where people are supposed to walk. What if the town finds that there are unpaved foot paths trodden by people ignoring the paving? What's the right thing to do? Erect fences to force people onto the paved paths? Or pave the unpaved but well-trodden foot paths?

Some of this thinking is an outgrowth of the days when computers were expensive compared to labor. IT had to focus on serving the hardware beast, and only indirectly on the end customer.

I think BI projects can be guilty of not paving the well-trodden paths. Some of this is in making a pragmatic trade off between design purity and user needs.

Elegant IT Solution:	Users Want:
Not to write canned reports – users should use flexible query tools	Canned reports
Managable/scalable/accurate web reporting tools	User Friendly Excel
A pure data warehouse back room with no user access	Every kind of access to their data

Features don't exist unless you know about them

Jensen Harris of Microsoft at "An Office User Interface Blog" tells the story of the missing drawing tools in Word and Excel:

again and again we hear stories about people assiduously creating drawings in PowerPoint and copying them over piece by piece into their Word or Excel document. I remember during a site visit watching a man create a simple flowchart in Excel which should have taken 3 minutes actually take 15 minutes because of all of the cross-application, clipboard, and windowing work it took to keep moving shapes between the apps.

Why do many people believe the drawing tools are only in PowerPoint? Quite simply, PowerPoint is the only application which shipped with the Drawing toolbar turned on by default.

This is an idea with broad impact for BI design: we need to make sure that users, especially casual users, see everything they need.