Innovative Products

This section deals with innovative requirements. We contend that the requirements analyst today must be looking for ways to improve his client's work. Improvements usually come about through innovation. Use innovation when you are working with stakeholders who have an existing situation that needs to be improved. Also, use innovation when you are working in a new application area. Naturally, if you work for a software house or something similar, innovation is what keeps you ahead of the pack.

If you want to compete in today's commercial market, or with offshore companies offering to build cheaper software for in-house consumption, or with the vast amount of available off-the-shelf software, or with the rapidly growing catalog of open source software, then innovation is your greatest ally. Software development productivity is fine as far as it goes, but buying off-the-shelf software will always be cheaper (providing it meets requirements). Climbing the CMM (capability maturity model) ladder is also fine, but it won't do you a bit of good if your client, your customers, and your users are not thrilled with your product.

"Our job is to give the client, on time and on cost, not what he wants, but what he never dreamed he wanted; and when he gets it, he recognizes it as something he wanted all the time."

Source: Denys Lasdon, architect

The requirements activity is all too often seen as a "stenographer's task," one where the requirements analyst passively records while the stakeholders state their needs. This view relies on stakeholders knowing exactly what they need and what they want. Our experience has been that, except for rare visionaries, people do not know what they want until they see it. Many of the most useful products that we take for granted today did not come about from the stakeholders' imagination or from people asking for something, but rather emerged from an invention. The mobile phone, text messaging, the World Wide Web, graphic user interfaces, the iPod, and many, many other products and services are inventionsno one asked for these things before they were invented.

Don't rely on your stakeholders knowing exactly what they want and, just as importantly, being able to ask for it. True, much of the product you build is a natural outcome of studying the users' work. However, if all of it is, then you have not improved anything. To make the leap forward, to deliver the product that truly satisfies your client, you have to be inventive.

Don't rely on your stakeholders knowing exactly what they want.

The first thing to consider is that you cannot invent a better way of working by merely automating yesterday's way of working. Nor can you do it by re-automating yesterday's automation. Only by rethinking the business use cases can you come up with innovative products that will be able to compete in tomorrow's marketplace. That is, for any business use case, you must first understand the essence and ensure that the stakeholders similarly understand it. Once you have achieved that goal, innovations and improvements will follow.

As an example of the kind of innovation we are talking about, consider your customers, the people who consume your product or service. Consumers today are much better informed than they have ever been, and they have ready access to information that previously was denied them. The Internet gives consumers the ability to easily find the best available prices and to make comparisons between almost all goods and services. Geography no longer matters. Consumers can order goods from anywhere in the world for delivery to their home in one or two days. As a result, customer loyalty and brand loyalty are rapidly disappearing, to be replaced by customer demand for better service and convenience. Think about the service and convenience requirements for the product you are planning to build. Do the requirements indicate the product will provide better service and greater convenience to your users or your organization's customers? If not, you run the risk of building a product that will be abandoned in short order.

Go back over any business use case concerned with providing anything to the outside world. What level of service and convenience does it currently provide? Can you improve it? Can you eliminate even one step of a buying or ordering business use case? Can you do something for the consumer that previously he did for himself? Note that we are not talking about design here. Ignore for the moment the technology you plan to use, and question the essence by thinking about what your business should be doing to provide better service and convenience.

How much control does your customer have over his transactions? People are happy, and in some cases demand, to do some of the work themselves. Supermarkets are introducingto much acclaimself check-out. Customers are shopping at home, ordering customized products they have specified themselves using interactive Web sites. People buy shares over the Internet without advice or intervention from a broker or trader. Travelers book their own airline flights over the Internet and check themselves in at the airport. This greater consumer involvement brings benefits to both parties: The airlines, and all other organizations that provide self-service, reduce the cost of the transaction by automating it; the consumer gets greater convenience and feels in control of the transaction.

Peters, Tom. The Circle of Innovation. Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

How connected are your customers to your business? Humans seem to have a love affair with connectedness. Drivers risk serious injury by answering their phones while driving. People step into the streets, paying attention only to the text message on the screen of their telephone. For young people in Japan, it is a serious social blunder to leave the phone at home or to allow its battery to run down. People of all ages check their e-mail in the middle of the night. Why? Because we love to be connected. And it can work for you. Customer loyalty cards, frequent-flyer plans, newsletters, branded credit cards, and automatic software updates are all examples of businesses connecting their customers. Think about the requirements for the connection that your product makes to your customers or users. Can you invent a better connection?

We love to be connected.

Choices and information are important requirements for all innovative products. Work with your stakeholders to find ways of giving the users or customers more and better information, and more and better choices. Keep in mind that consumers today have access to an incredible amount of information, but even so, seem to want more. Give it to them before your competitor does.

A little later in this chapter we talk about techniques for fostering innovation. In particular, we look at creativity workshops, brainstorming, and personas as aids to inventing better requirements.

Naturally, your new product is not completely invented. It must be based on the work that it is to support. However, you cannot simply mark off some existing functionality and automate it. Instead, you must invent a better way to do the workthat is, "better" in that it provides better control for the user or customer, better information, better choices, better connectivity, better service, better response to requests, and probably at a lower cost to your organization.