The Need for a Special Approach in the Development of ICT Projects

The Different Nature of ICT Projects

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) projects are different from common manufactured or consumer products in that they are not built through an expensive production line that requires physical resources difficult to change and modify.

If properly designed, changes to software, databases, interfaces, documentation, workflows, features and functionality can be done rather quickly and inexpensively (in comparison to other products).

ICT projects also serve a broader audience, both in geographical and cultural terms, and are subject to more fierce competition and consumer mobility.

In addition, ICT projects tend to be part of social spaces where people coincide, interact and communicate, highly increasing the relevance of community or social pressure and trends well above the individual preferences.

Finally, ICT projects are subject to intense competition from all directions and users' loyalty is really low. Users are tempted daily to test and use alternatives to the IT products or services they currently use and are effectively attracted by new features and the hype of those alternatives. The fierce competition of the constant changing IT market leaves no time for doing a full iteration in a conventional development process to come up with improvements at the risk of losing your user base.

What determines the success of an ICT Project

More often than not, what determines the success of an ICT project is not how well it addresses the needs of the its users, but how well it helps the end user to be perceived by others and how well the user can fit in within a larger group and thrive within it.

There are countless of well documented cases of excellent designs that do poorly among the consumers they are meant to serve and are perfectly design for.

Think about the Mac computer, which for all the well deserved praise, usability features, gorgeous design, ease of use, instant adoration and love from users, it remains with less than a 5% of the market share.

Think about the Palm handheld devices, light, fast with lengthy battery life, innovative interface and all the insight of usability wizards and how they were quickly displaced by the clunky but highly compatible Windows based PDA’s.

What Drives Users Behavior and Drives their Response

The end user is not looking for the perfect application, neither the simplest one, nor the fastest. Actually no one can tell what the community is looking for until the community is actively engaged, not just probed or sampled and the behavior trends start to form. The very introduction of a product or service can actually trigger trends among a community of target audience.

Often, this behavior trends have nothing to do with usability or features, but just as it happens in financial markets, the end user decision and preferences come out of “noise”, word of mouth, even plain copy-others behavior and the definite impact of early adopters and influential members of the community.

That is the only explanation for the abundance of clunky products and solutions we all deal with on a daily basis, from constantly crashing Windows operating systems to insecure e-mail protocols, and a broad range of functionality impaired devices and systems that include insanely unsafe credit cards, difficult to program remote controllers, junk mail and telemarketers.

The Benefits of a Collaborative and Continuous
Development Processes for ICT Projects

Luckily, well designed ICT projects and products can adapt, evolve, morph quickly according to the users’ response and constantly attempt to match usability features with community trends and market performance.

Conventional development processes and methodologies are not designed to acknowledge the flexible nature of Information and Communication Technologies and therefore fail to tap into the potential of their environments and lack the mechanism for engaging the community in the development process.

Most consist in discrete, discontinuous processes of research, observation, design, prototyping, testing, deploying and going back to the beginning. In the best scenarios, this becomes an iterative process that repeats itself over long and expensive design-to-market cycle.

But Information and Communication Technologies provide us with the tools, the flexibility, and the mediums for a continuous, non-discrete, open and transparent, collaborative process that directly engages the whole of the community in the design, development and deployment stages.

Many challenges arise from such an approach, but the potential benefits of real time validation, assured satisfaction and positive response of the audience targeted make it unthinkable to continue trying to apply old linear, hierarchical conventional methodologies to develop solutions, products and services for a dynamical, interconnected and active audience.

Most ICT projects are (in various degree levels) about virtual communities and social networking or evolve around them. So it is an obvious observation and almost tautological affirmation that there is no better way to build a social network, than through a social network itself.

Finally, by directly engaging the community of end users continuously throughout the development process a true sense of ownership, of belonging and relationships around it form, reducing resistance to change and rejection levels both by the individual and the community as a whole.