UI, UX and findability

Amazingly, I now have a rollup of over 30 internal apps with target dates for migration to the standardized UI. Getting there was easier than we feared, most of the development teams were fairly receptive and the pushbacks could be anticipated – resources, overloaded work slates and budget. My team is central and funded as an expense so we were able to position ourselves as additional, no-cost resources per project. The timing issue got easier when we made it clear that we were happy to work in existing release schedules and if they needed all of 2007 to get there, that was fine so long as it wasn’t open-ended.

Next stop, another 10 vendor applications. My mileage will clearly vary. I need to spend some serious time analyzing the Portal upgrade approach and coming to a go/no-go on that.

This Tuesday I participated in a World Usability Day panel on managing the usability function within the enterprise. I met a few folks from my own organization and we are trying to maintain a dialogue. This is an emerging theme, last week I was contacted by another person internally who said she’d been trying to find me (not me personally, but whoever does what I do) for that past two years. A community of four has emerged.

Findability in the enterprise typically sucks and it’s compounded by the timidity that we have about allowing people to manage information about themselves and their expertise and even further repressed by lack of rewards for sharing knowledge. Social networking is the only way to manage this right now, but I’m hopeful that we can leverage blogs and wikis to create sturctures that help lubricate the process. But creating community in an organization is hard. Anyone with thoughts about that? Please share them, I need help with this.