Steven Webster: General Archives

August 13, 2007

Speaking on Design-Led Innovation of RIA at Usability Professionals Association meeting

Is it really March since I last blogged....anyway; I'm speaking at a local chapter of the Usability Professionals Association tomorrow evening. It's always a pleasure to speak at the UPA chapters - there is always a great blend of technologists, human-centrered designers and line of business owners, such that there's great conversation around the importance of Design and Technology in unison.

The talk I'm giving is called "Design Led Innovation", and talks of the Design approach that Adobe Consulting takes to creating innovative human-centered solutions that are able to fuse business needs with end-user needs upon Adobe (and other) technologies.

The talk takes place in Edinburgh; with the Edinburgh Festival in full swing, it feels like most of the world is here right now, so if you need a short break from the insanity, I'm speaking at the Microsoft Offices (I can't think of a better place to demonstrate what we've been delivering with Flex and AIR over the last few years) on George Street, at 6pm tomorrow. I'll be talking about our philosophy of Design Led Innovation, demonstrating some of the work that results from this philosophy and sharing some insights into "how we do it".

Event details including location and times can be found here

It's a talk I've given to customer, analysts and usergroups in the past, and will be a prelude to some of the things I'll be sharing at MAX in Chicago and Barcelona later in the year.

Posted by swebster at 03:56 PM | Comments (1)

January 08, 2007

AC2k7 - Flex2 and beyond, LiveCycle 8, Apollo, Cairngorm 3, Methodology and Madness, Design Led Innovation and more !

I promise this will be the nerdiest blog title I'll have all year.  It was almost AC2k6++.  2006 has been a tremendous year within Adobe Consulting. I want to kick-off 2007 with some retrospective of how far we've come in the last while with all things RIA, and then take a look forward to my thoughts on what's in store for us in our chosen field in 2007, while sharing some of the topics and thoughts that I hope to elaborate upon in the year ahead.

Running my own company with Alistair trying to convince the enterprise world of the need for more engaging user-experiences and then assuring them that they could be delivered upon the Flash platform, sometimes seems like only yesterday (warning - self-assessment tax deadlines in the UK are end of the month) but most times feels like a past life.  In 2006, we really seem to have come so far in the world of Rich Internet Applications.  My key observation going into 2006, was that I was spending less and less of my time advocating "experience matters" within organisations.  That which was not yet self-evident the years before, was now the starting point for conversation - so much of my evangelism efforts this year have been less focussed on why and more focussed on how an organisation can be more effective, or more impactful and successful, through a richer user-experience. One doesn't have to look hard now to find the importance of user-experience, and the value of user-experience focus, as core message from vendors, or core requirement from customers.  It's interesting to see how often the "experience matters" rhetoric resurfaces in a same-but-different guise.

Experience really matters, I guess.

I'm confident that 2007 is going to be a year in which we really see organisations striving to thrive and survive online through innovation - innovation in their online service delivery through a well conceived and expertly crafted experience Design.  Design with a big d ?  I'll be coming back to that in future blog posts.

I talked just there about innovation in service delivery; while it's true that Rich Internet Applications can deliver much more effective user-experiences upon existing service infrastructure ("on the glass"), true innovation can be applied "behind the glass" as well, seamlessly optimising the underlying orchestration of business processes that the user-experience is exposing.  As easy as it often can be to point fingers at a particularly memorable bad online experience, often that experience is the necessary surfacing of unnecessary underlying madness. 

When I tried to transfer money using my online bank to pay for some home improvements, it turned out that in the history of online banking with that account, I'd already paid 20 people money (that's a lot for a Scottish guy) online, and I wasn't allowed to pay 21.  Ridiculous - but I deleted someone that I had no intention of giving money to again (that's not so tough for a Scottish guy) so that I could add a new payee.  Now I have 19 previous payees, and I add the 20th one ... I'm still not allowed.  Same error message.  I've paid too many people for a Scottish person, please contact customer services with a good explanation.  I guess the payee I deleted is marked as deleted, but not physically deleted from the database, because there'll be some referential integrity violated if they perform a physical SQL delete.  Listen to me for a minute -- should I need to be excusing the online bank's behavior with Relational Database theory ? 

Of course I shouldn't, the offline inmates are off running the online asylum.

This story reinforces my point and ambition. As much as we should continue to innovate in the quality of user-experience that we are willing to deliver to end-users, in this era of service oriented architecture we should also ensure that services are designed and orchestrated as such; that they are not allowed to become the tail that wags the dog. 

There is equal opportunity for us to focus on improving the back-end, unseen, over-the-wire and behind-the-glass services, whether that be through elimination or optimisation of paper-based processes or perhaps improving the workflow necessary to fulfil an apparently simple task.

Have you ever thought of just how much effort goes on behind the scenes when you click the "buy now" button on iTunes and a minute later you have an entire album, plus track listings, plus artwork on your portable MP3 player ?  I'll be talking about exactly these kind of beautifully Designed, seamlessly executed, insanely great solutions in much more depth in this blog throughout 2007.

That's why I'm particularly excited this year about the LiveCycle 8 technology, and the kind of solutions that Adobe Consulting are increasingly delivering for our clients, or helping our partners deliver, by leveraging LiveCycle services with rich Flex user-experiences.  I can't wait to talk more about the innovations that are possible when these 2 worlds collide.  Throw Flex Data Services into that mix, and season with a little forthcoming Apollo goodness, and 2007 is going to be an opportunity for us to engage in the delivery of some truly innovative Design-led solutions.  Design had a big d there again.  Sorry.  Habit.  I'll explain later.

Technology-wise, I look forward to blogging ( more ... we all have that as a resolution this month, right ?) on the continuing innovation of enterprise products from Adobe; from what's coming in LiveCycle 8 and Apollo, to current and future Flex and Flex Data Services goodness.  And more ?

The Adobe Consulting team will continue to share what we consider best-practices with our technologies, gleaned from the projects we're working on with clients worldwide, through our blogs, through devnet, through conferences such as MAX, and through whatever other means you consider valuable to you.  It's a big part of our remit to ensure that we're sharing our insights and experiences to help ensure that you are more successful, more easily, in your own implementations.  We spoke a little at MAX about Cairngorm 3, and I look forward to progress there in 2007. 

One of my roles within Adobe Consulting is to ensure that the consultants in my part of the team are focussed not just on delivering value to clients through their day-to-day consulting engagements, but are also delivering value to partners and the community at large, by focussing time and energy in internal technology initiatives that have wider value to a wider audience. Some of the AC2k6 contributions are below:

Our goals are locked down for the first half of 2007, and I look forward to that work being completed and released in the wild - not just around Flex, but around Apollo, LiveCycle and all manner of other technologies, best-practices or productity enhanching tools.

I also intend sharing much more insight through this blog into the approach we take to delivering solutions, from inception through to delivery.  Software methodology.  Consulting approach.  How do we plan for innovation ?   How do we deliver innovation ? How do we position the value of an RIA engagement ?   How can we ascribe value to delivery of an improved user-experience ? How do we staff a project - what are the roles necessary to deliver an Enterprise RIA solution, and what workflow, what assets, what deliverables, what handovers and what cross-over exists between these roles ?   How do we blend cutting-edge Design with cutting-edge delivery  ?  How do we take agile software approaches to defining and delivering user-experiences, and harmonise them with the needs of our User Experience consultants to ensure they gain the insights necessary for innovation ?

In many ways, these state of the art technologies with which we share passion, are our bread and butter. 

The technologies are the easy part. It's what we do with them that's the difficult part.

As always, I look forward to seeing what you're doing with them; and as best I can look forward to showing you what we're doing, and how we're doing it.

And 2007 will be all the richer for it.

Posted by swebster at 12:32 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

November 27, 2006

More on Adobe Consulting Hiring in Europe

Further to my last blog entry - I've been literally inundated with responses from people keen to understand more about working within our RIA and LiveCycle and UX practices in EMEA. I'll respond to everyone individually, but until I do, I just wanted to put a note out on my blog here thanking everyone for their interest - the level of response means that I've created a much greater task for myself than I expected, and will be working through the applications with others in the team, and with our HR team, in the weeks ahead.

Posted by swebster at 01:50 PM | Comments (1)

November 20, 2006

Adobe Consulting hiring Technical and User-Experience Consultants in Europe

Adobe Consulting continues to grow it’s team within Europe; whether you’re passionate about helping our enterprise customers and partners to be successful in the delivery of innovative solutions upon front-line Adobe technologies such as Flex and Apollo, and our enterprise technologies including Flex Data Services and the LiveCycle products, or whether you’re passionate about design-led innovation, about creating solutions that hide all that technology from the consumer or citizen in an insanely great user-experience that is simpler, easier and more effective for them to achieve their task, then we want to hear from you.

Design-led innovation is our go-to-market approach, bringing together the technical capabilities of Adobe technology through deep insight of our customers needs, and even deeper insight as to who their customers are, what their needs are, and how we can meet them with innovative solutions.

We’re looking for Technical Architects to work in our RIA and LiveCycle practice; you’re likely to be an enterprise software developer with experience of the J2EE platform, who has been delivering n-tier software applications upon industry best-practices. Your specialism may lie in the presentation-tier, where you’ll re-apply your expertise with technologies such as Flex and Apollo, or in the business and integration tiers, where you’ll transfer your knowledge and expertise to our technologies such as Flex Data Services and the LiveCycle suite of technologies. Though you’re likely able to stand toe-to-toe technically with the best of them, you’re most satisfied when you’re travelling and meeting with real customers and helping them solve their real business needs. Working on a daily basis with other technical consultants and your colleagues in the user-experience practice, you’re blending your deep technical experience with their expertise in delivering reference solutions and innovative user-experiences. You’ll have the opportunity to leverage the experience you have while gaining deep experience in our current and future technologies, from Flex and Flex Data Services to Apollo, LiveCycle and beyond.

On the other hand, perhaps you don’t care how it all works behind the glass; perhaps your passion is more about what appears on the glass in the first place. Whether you’re an Information Architect or a Visual Designer, a Creative Director or a Product Engineer, we’re equally seeking the people who can conceive the experiences that we deliver to our customers through our platform. Whether you’re meeting with our customers to gain insights into their business needs, or meeting with their customers to understand the diversity of the user-ecosystem, the individual needs, goals, attitudes and ambitions of the users that are engaging with our products, or whether you’re taking these insights and turning them into an information architecture, an interaction design, a user-experience prototype or a visual and choreography design, we need to hear from you. We’re growing our talented user-experience design practice within Europe, and if this is your area of passion we want you to try out for the team.

I’d love to hear from you – the first step of the interview process is working out how to contact me. My first name dot last name over at adobe dot com is one way, or swebster at the same domain is likely to get me as well.

We have positions open across Europe, with tremendous opportunity for travel wherever you are based. I look forward to hearing from you.

Posted by swebster at 05:46 PM | Comments (3)

September 27, 2006

RIA Jobs with Adobe Consulting and Adobe Product Teams

So it's exciting times at Adobe, as we are recruiting for the growth of our consulting practices and our product teams. There are a number of job openings in the RIA Practice in the US, in the Flex product team and in the Breeze product team, that I keep being asked if I know anyone that fits the bill. If you're reading this blog, you're probably the kind of person I'd hire :) so I figured I'd post here !

Adobe Consulting

We're growing our Manhattan office in New York City with a consulting presence. We're looking for a couple of technical architects with bias in either LiveCycle or RIA technologies to join our User Experience colleagues who have already setup office downtown. If you're interested in joining our consulting group based out of New York, then drop an email to tiffany s at adobe dot com.

Flex Product Team

We're looking for a senior level engineer to join the Flex team, to work on proof of concepts for next-generation products. The Flex platform is an incredibly exciting technology; this is an opportunity to get on the inside of defining the future of RIA. There's a link over at cooljobs.adobe.com if you're interested.

Breeze Product Team

I had the pleasure of spending some time with the Breeze product team last year, as they were working with Flex and Cairngorm. This forward looking team now has an opening for a software engineer on the team. I'll post the full job description here, as I've not caught it online yet - but for those of you working with Flex and Cairngorm, note that we're eating our own dogfood at Adobe, and these are desirable skills for candidates interested in applying. If you fancy this role, drop an email with your resume to barnes at adobe dot com with a subject heading of "Resume for Breeze Applications Team".

Software Engineer

Recognizing that employees are at the core of our success, Adobe recruits and retains highly qualified and motivated individuals, creates an environment where they can innovate and achieve their best, and rewards them for their performance by giving them an opportunity to share in the company’s success.

Position Summary:

If you are a software engineer with a passion for putting great technology to good use, the drive to do the right thing, and the pragmatism to do it in a way that meets customer requirements and product schedules, you will enjoy working at Adobe and we'd love to have you on our team. We have some great ideas about how to shape the future of Internet application development and we are looking for someone to help us turn these ideas into products and ship them (quickly). We are looking for a hands-on contributor who can dive in and make significant contributions to the Breeze product and help deliver great new user experiences.

Knowledge & Skills:

• Extensive knowledge and proven experience in Adobe Flash and Adobe Flash ActionScript development.

• Ability to design and create highly accessible, practical and innovative user interfaces.

• Proven experience in building, and deploying commercial-grade software, with a focus on web applications and an advanced level of server integration.

• Ability to work closely with multiple teams including product management, QA, operations and other engineering teams to design and implement cutting-edge solutions.

• Passion for researching interesting new technologies especially related to evolving industry standards.

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or Software Engineering, or equivalent.

• A minimum of three years' experience developing Internet-based Adobe Flash applications.

• Experience with Adobe Flex, Cairngorm, and other languages, presentation technologies, and data technologies a plus.

• Excellent analytical, writing, and interpersonal skills.

Adobe believes personal fulfillment and company success go hand in hand, sustaining one another. In fact, our dynamic, rewarding working environment is well known – including seven consecutive years on FORTUNE magazine’s "100 Best Companies to Work For" and other, similar accolades. By hiring the very best and brightest, Adobe continues to be a simply better place to work – creating a dynamic environment today and providing incentives for future achievement.

Posted by swebster at 06:02 PM | Comments (5)

April 20, 2006

Adobe Consulting RIA Practice are now blogging...

The RIA practice within Adobe Consulting in EMEA has steadily grown around the former iteration::two team; everyone is working with on a number of truly exciting RIA solutions for a number of our partners and customers in the EMEA territory. As part of our Adobe Consulting committment to sharing the knowledge and best-practice within our organisation with the wider community, a number of our consultants are now armed with weblogs. A brief summary of the consultants and their blogs follows:

Steven Webster - As we edge towards the release of Flex 2, I expect to be blogging a great deal more around the business of Rich Internet Applications, the opportunities for the community to be successful delivering RIA solutions for their clients, as well as continued in-depth discussion around methodology, best-practices, Cairngorm 2.0 and deep-technical features on Flex 2, as well as looking to how RIA will be evolving beyond Flex 2 as we start to consider the solution opportunities that exist upon the wider Adobe Engagement Platform.

Alistair McLeod - Alistair has had an opportunity to deliver some stunning solutions on Flex 2.0 lately; already, we're really leveraging the expressiveness of MXML and ActionScript 3.0 to more rapidly deliver solutions to problems that were more challenging to achieve with Flex 1.x. I'd expect to see some code-gems from Alistair in the months ahead, as he shares examples of some of the ways in which we're pushing Flex 2 to it's limits.

Andy Rayne - iteration::two employee number 3, Andy has been building RIAs with us since Flash MX 2004, ActionScript 1.0 and the Flash Remoting days. Andy has also been with Ali and I (pre-iteration::two !!) while we learned to embrace how agile development could improve the way we were delivering web-delivered software. Often the guy that "keeps us real" with unit-testing, test-driven development, refactoring and all things agile, Andy has also been knee-deep in the delivery of Flex solutions since he first built http://www.caledonbank.com/ I expect we'll see a lot of "in the trenches" blog posts from Andy in the months ahead.

Daniel Harfleet - When I think about dot com, I think of me and Dan. Dan came to iteration::two with a tremendous amount of experience delivering enterprise solutions over the web, mobile and iDTV. Since the early days of Flex 1.x, Dan was keen to understand how Flex and JMS could be leveraged together. It's no surprise therefore that he has been very focussed on understanding the solution opportunities that exist as we marry these technologies together through Flex Data Services. Dan has also been responsible in the last few years, for the delivery of some truly innovative solutions that bring client-side technologies such as Flex and Flash Media Server together with J2EE and persistence tier technologies such as Hibernate and iBatis. I'm excited about some of the technical integration solutions that Dan proposes.

Peter Martin - Peter joined Adobe Consulting with a deep expertise in the delivery of mission-critical J2EE applications, particularly in the financial services industry. Stand at a whiteboard and mention security, performance, load balancing, clustering, session replication or single-sign on, and the room hasn't suddenly gone dark, it's just Peter standing behind you at the whiteboard. Peter also joined us with a passion for agile delivery of software, and has already done some great work for us in our continuous build environment, working on our internal tooling around Flex Unit, Cruise Control, and improving development workflow in Eclipse. I think you'll get a great deal of productivity enhancement in your Flex development from some of what I expect Peter to be sharing.

Gerry McLarnon - Gerry also joined Adobe Consulting with a deep expertise of J2EE application development, also with strong focus in the financial services industry, and is leading the development of financial service Flex projects for us in Edinburgh. Gerry is a big fan of the integrated development environment, and of developers learning to use tools like the integrated debugger in Flex Builder 2.0 to improve their productivity. I'd also expect a great deal of J2EE crossover from Gerry in his blog posts, and look forward to the Flex 2 experiences that he'll be able to share in the weeks and months ahead.

Paul Williams - Paul has also crossed over from enterprise web-application development with J2EE, into the brave new world of RIA development. Paul has been concentrated heavily on developing with Flex 2, Cairngorm 2 and Flex Builder 2. Paul has been focussed on the development of dashboard applications with a number of Adobe Consulting clients of late, and so has particular focus with Flex 2 container development with templates, component development and skinning with the Flex 2 framework.

Alex Uhlmann - finally, Alex was the last hire at iteration::two, before we were acquired by Macromedia Consulting. It's fair to say that his creation and contribution to the open-source Animation Package project was what caught our eye with Alex, and we've really been leveraging that knowledge, combined with the new expressiveness capabilities of the new Flash Player, to deliver what we think is a step-change in interactivity, choreography and user-experience with Flex applications. I'd be surprised if some of his first contributions to his blog are not around leveraging this expressiveness of the Flash Player, and achieving an even great degree of cinematic effect. However, Alex has been churning out a number of Flex 2 projects recently and will have much to share with us in general I expect.

In the months ahead, I'm sure more of our Adobe Consulting colleagues will be joining us in the blogosphere, but for the time being, the guys above have been charged with disseminating some of the good-stuff out to the community as much as possible. Typically, we'll watch flexcoders to get a sense of where the community perhaps is in need of guidance, and so don't be surprised if our blog posts start to provide deep insight into some of your flexcoders questions from time to time.

And so all that remains, is to mark this as the final post on the iteration::two weblog at www.richinternetapps.com. Our blog, which started life as a small part of the burgeoning Flexcoders community, has been a source of much reward from us, allowing us to reach out and connect with a tremendous community to date. When Flex 2 ships, I expect to see a tremendous spurt in the growth of that community, and hope that our grown-up Adobe Consulting blogs can bring that same reward. www.richinternetapps.com won't be disappearing anywhere soon, so all the archived posts are still available.

iteration::two was a blast. But this next iteration is going to be a great deal more fun...

Posted by swebster at 11:42 PM | Comments (6)