I’m relieved to say that my dissertation is done, it was an arduous experience creating it but extremely valuable. I learned a great deal through the creation of this paper especially about motivation 
it turned out to be about 19,000 words, 80 pages, 89 cross-referenced academic sources.
I will post a summary but I can’t face it right now, here’s the abstract:
This paper asks the question, how does Experience Design contribute to the competitive advantage of e-Business. Our research indicates that it contributes to competitive advantage in three ways:
1. Building relational capital with stakeholders (in this case customers) outside the traditional boundaries of the company, culminating in deeper, more meaningful relationships and increased customer value.
2. Enables co-creation of value with customers generating intellectual capital and increased customer value.
3. Provides a basis for future growth as a rich source of market-based intellectual capital contributing to product and market development.
In e-Business value creation process is changing and so are the resources that are valuable. The value creation process is mediated by network technologies that allow stakeholders to participate in the value creation process that are outside the traditional organizational boundaries. The ability for the value creation process to include new participants also provides access to new resources that need to be created and managed in novel ways, but can create significant value.
Experience Design is the key activity in enabling these market-based assets and then harness them for competitive advantage.
From this we proposed three theories:
1. The four universal characteristics of Experience Design
2. A two-factor theory of customer motivation based on customer experience
3. A model of the organization and its relationship to Market-Based Resources.
More on the subject of what business we’re in anyway, shuffling information around I for one think there is an indelible link between what generally falls in the IT realm of CRM and KM, and what Experience Design is about.
I had participated in a conversation about what information was on beth mazurs idblog and I just found a little gem of information that was interesting also relating to the topic that I thought was interesting.
Beamish and Armistead (2001) argue that technological developments have provoked a reinstitution of the debate around the interpretation of knowledge. Their definitions of data, information and knowledge are used here:
data=points of reality;
information=organised data; and
knowledge=information, context and experience.
Dissertation update: it is really getting quite exciting, really, that is if your interested making your business more competitive
“For every complex problem there is a simple solution… that is wrong”
(George Bernard Shaw 1856-1950; Irish Playwright and critic)
In the case of IT there are some increasingly complex solutions that are wrong as well.
In the instance of CRM, it has grown to levels currently where it is estimated that companies are investing more than $1.5 billion per quarter on CRM-related applications (source: AMR, 2003). The scale of CRM investment is even more interesting when it is estimated that over 50% of CRM projects are considered a failure from the customersí point of view (source: Gartner, 2003).
Information Technology is a misnomer as it’s main concern is moving and storing Data, not information, information is data but with structure, and even that is useless when buried in it. Information only becomes useful with the addition of a rich understanding of context.
Experience Design is certainly about deep understanding of the context of use and experience, leading to increasingly useful, thoughtful, purposful technology. It’s about results.
I’m up to 8,000 words in my dissertation and feeling better, 9 days to go, 7,000 words, edits, layout, binding, packaging… I don’t have time to be writing this but if I didn’t write the the IT quote down it would have been lost. I would so love to coin a phrase, that would be fun.
When we are interacting with a person who works for an organization and they let us down by behaving badly in some way, we can sometimes forgive them (depending on how our empathy meter is doing). We tend to think; everyone has bad days, they’re just doing there job, I wouldn’t want to do that job etc.
When we interact with a web site and it lets us down, by behaving badly, losing our information, asking us to register our home address when we just want to send an email etc. we find it had to forgive. Why? because we know that when a website totally disrespects our time, intelligence or needs its not just one person that let us down, but a whole team of people.
“The interaction a customer has with a web site is a very intimate interaction with an organizations brand, when it lets us down, the brand lets us down”
Interview with David Tames of innovationcatalyst.com
Who knew my blog was even being traded? my blogs stock.
Aparantly my stock shot up to $2,970.32 (I’m not sure if that’s good or not).
It certainly cheered me up today, my dissertation is getting me down at this stage, 18 days and 15,000 words to go, I’m vacillating between despair and elation at this point.
Here’s a great example of the higher level goals that Experience Design could contribute to or help operationalize:
Two wonderful quotes from an interesting article from McKinsey Quarterly called “The Value in Organization”
“CEOs must now be more architect than general: the job is to design working environments where thousands of people know what to do, cooperate to get it done, and experience it as personally fulfilling.”
“Yet another and perhaps more important skill lies between the two, in the realm of organization: the design of structures, systems, and mechanisms to guide and motivate the actions of employees and the critical task of implementing new organizational systems.”
How do you operationalize that? I don’t know many CEO’s with the skill set to impliment that. I think you would need a multi-disciplined team with some kind of unifying vision and process that would enable “the design of structures, systems, and mechanisms to guide and motivate the actions of employees.”
I do believe that some of this could be achieved with an internal branding effort based on the realities and strengths of the business, but if you want to really create an coherent experience for employees you have to address the information and knowledge systems that support their work, the communicaiton systems that connect them with customers and each other, and the interior design of there work environment etc. Moreover everything must be designed to support the reality of their everyday work life, so that doesn’t mean slamming in a CRM system and a KM system and then refurbishing the office.
Sounds like a pretty rich Experience Design project, if you believe in the wider, strategic concept of Experience Design. Like ED as a unifying force that enables multiple diciplines produce a set of distinct products that work together in a coherent fashion.
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