While dusting off the last of my CDs last night (my cherished Beatles collection), I came across one of my favorite covers, Abbey Road. I observed how each of the Beatles was walking in uniform manner, yet each subtly showing his strong personality (such as Paul’s bare feet). What was so great about this band is that they perfected their sound and style early in their career, yet they constantly looked for ways to remain relevant through innovation.

A common challenge I help my clients face, particularly in this economic climate, is how to sustain a competitive advantage in their core business through both operational efficiency and incremental technology improvements. While I thrive on finding ways to keep an organization successful and improve the bottom line, I’m ever attentive to the possibility that an organization can become myopic with respect to understanding where the next disruptive innovation will sprout up. So often, we see big companies miss a change in market direction that is addressed by a niche competitor. What excites me the most about my job is the opportunity to help a client sustain its competitive advantage while also finding ways to be the leader in bringing the next big innovation into being, as the Beatles continually did.

Continuous Improvement

The Beatles always knew what made them special and built upon it. Continuously improving processes and delivering competitive products in established markets means you know what you are good at, presumably your core business, and vigorously defend your position. At LEVEL, we look at our client’s go-to-market strategy, internal culture, competitive position and key performance indicators to establish a snapshot of the company’s position and trajectory. The key is to have a baseline that includes a composite view of all the Key Performance Indicators and priorities, so that measurements can be continuously taken long after the project is completed to ensure that our client is defending their core market and making relevant decisions that lead to increased market share and operating margins over time.

Building a culture of innovation

A company creates additional value when it is continually improving its market position. Unfortunately, management’s incentives are often much more tied to growing existing markets that are familiar, making it difficult to explore technologies that utilize disruptive technologies. This is logical because new markets are often much smaller and don’t shine with the generous operating margins and volumes the company is used to with mature products. We suggest to clients that they establish a culture of innovation. There is an array of ways this can be achieved, such as creating an independent organization that allows for the incubation of new ideas. By incubating and insulating these new products, it allows them to grow more slowly, while the market recognizes and adopts the innovation.

Enabling continuous improvement and building a culture of innovation are at the heart of organizations with exceptional financial performance, somewhat like what the Beatles did with rock and roll so many years ago.

There’s been a lot of noise of late about big announcements from Google concerning Wave, yet another portal framework (at least the developer brief makes it sound like one) and its disruptive potential for the Internet. Let’s not forget the emerging standards for do-it-yourself “portals”: the Drupals, Wordpresses and Alfrescos of the world. A purist (like me) would gripe that none of these are not true enterprise portal frameworks. Some are social platforms; others content management systems masquerading with portal-esque features. A full-blown portal implies a breadth of functionality that includes all of the above, plus an underlying architecture that allows one to do pretty much whatever. A portal worth its salt is equally useful as a drop-and-pop solution or as a foundation for a completely proprietary result (hint: the former typically leads down a path to the latter so start with a big enough boat). Portals are rapidly creeping into the space that is traditionally content management and digital asset management, infusing social in to the mix everywhere. “Stavie’s Pick” is Liferay because it’s all that and a bag of chips with a community that’s seeded from one of the brightest I’ve witnessed; these guys are true rock stars.

Regardless, portals, for all practical purposes, are akin to an operating system; it just happens that the OS is the Internet (Wave+Chrome, by the way, are no coincidence). Like most desktop OS, each has its strengths and merits, and frequently, one is more aptly suited to achieve a specific goal than another. The evolution of each product in its respective market space defines where. As it turns out, they are all good, all useful and all a potential solution. Predictably, the trick is in picking the right combinations and getting them to play nice together. If only there were a LinkMyTwitFace.com . . . or whatever flavors you prefer.

Enter the Cold Stone Creamery of opportunities for portal: custom mashups of many points of presence create ubiquity and agility for brands. Mashing already mashed social points of presence to build brand awareness is, well, mushy. How does one create a cohesive brand presence and a single point of administration? The trick is not in picking a platform, but rather, the platforms that are critical to meet your business goals. Moreover, a wise strategy will find the right balance of brand CMS, portal, asset management and other applications that comprise a modern Internet-based OS to build brand awareness and drive prosperity.

The tools are only half the puzzle and the real trick is getting them to talk to each other. The secret sauce is to know when to Wave, when to Tweet and when to Liferay.

Google’s home page image for today, July 10th, is a Tesla Coil in celebration of the inventor Nikola Tesla, whose birthday is today and for whom our client Tesla Motors is named after. From Wikipedia, “…Tesla contributed in varying degrees to the establishment of robotics, remote control, radar and computer science, and to the expansion of ballistics, nuclear physics, and theoretical physics. In 1943, the Supreme Court of the United States credited him as being the inventor of the radio…” He also apparently developed devices that led to modern-day X-rays, AC electricity, systems for wireless communications and concepts for electrical vehicles.

More on Nikola Tesla: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla
And Tesla Motors: http://www.teslamotors.com

Years ago, there was all this geek drool behind this newfangled (well, kinda) UI concept called “Resolution Independence”. In oversimplified terms, it’s the notion that the size of visual elements, such as text and graphics displayed on computer screens, could be freely increased or decreased without any detriment to clarity (i.e. no fuzziness or blockiness). For more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resolution_independence. This topic comes up every once in a while between clients and developers.

“RI” was supposed to be the next step in graphics that would make UI much more accessible for the visually impaired, would take maximum advantage of higher resolution displays and it would also find all of your missing socks. So… what happened?

Both Mac OS X and Vista have supported it since a few versions ago and have seen a couple apps and demos here and there. There are nuances of it in the latest versions of Flash (things like 9-slice scaling). No real adoption though, at least beyond the OS level and some of their bundled applications. There is also a smattering of apps out there that have made the leap. As a whole though, at least what I’ve seen, it’s still a little quirky and quite inconsistent. All of the pieces are there, just slow adoption.

Here’s some contemplations and realities:

1. Production (or reproduction) of tens or hundreds of icons, UI slices and backgrounds at 2 to 6 times the original size is time-consuming and challenging work with little payback in many cases. The ability to up-sample a UI for legibility or a tad more “slickness” under special conditions? Maybe not enough of a payoff for the flood of additional hours, not to mention the size bloat and possible performance issues.

2. There really hasn’t been a huge leap in display resolution, with the exception of perhaps some laptop displays and mobile devices. Mainstream displays (at least for desktop) need to get over the stank of ~72-100 ppi and get way into the 200+ ppi zone (approaching low-end print res). Imagine cramming all of the pixels of a 30″+ display into a 22″. Goodbye to antialiasing-tweaking issues, sub-pixel mash (hello “snap to pixels”, hehe) and simply beautiful, print-like imagery and text on the screen. I know this is wishful thinking and that shift doesn’t appear to be on the horizon soon. Way too expensive unless there’s some sort of breakthrough. Overall, maybe its a chicken/egg thing? Kidding.

Q: Why don’t designers just develop all UI elements and iconography as vector art? That way it’s infinitely scalable and fluid.

A: Try drawing modern UI elements, such as photorealistic textures, believable lighting, smooth gradients and shadow details, with a drawing toolkit that features points, lines, beziers and fills. Not practical unless you are one of the 10 people on the planet who can do stuff like this with vectors.

Sure, SGI Irix had scalable vector icons, and they looked like clip art for a reason. Want to see a single modern icon constructed with vectors? It’s about 3 megs and just about takes down your machine to render it to screen.

Try opening it up in an image viewer and zoom in and out while panning around — not very fluid. This is another reason why ginormous bitmaps are created instead of the pure vector route for now.

To be continued… (standards, pipelines and RI for the web)

In a rare display of self-discipline, I did absolutely nothing this 4th of July weekend. I planted myself in front of the TV and proceeded down a road that included Sarah Palin’s resignation, Roger Federer’s record 15th Grand Slam title at Wimbledon and Tiger Wood’s 68th PGA Tour victory at the AT&T Congressional. But the best was saved for last.

On Sunday evening, 60 Minutes aired a segment with Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger discussing the final moments before U.S. Airways Flight 1549 made its dramatic landing in New York’s Hudson River. What struck me about the interview was Sullenberger’s humility, his quiet confidence and the reflective introspection he showed throughout the interview. In his own words Captain Sully was just “doing his job”.

Watch the interview.