Where are my keys!?!

Gulp!

Back in 2008, the Development team was tasked by management to improve the customer experience for ePublisher license management.  The primary goal for the licensing system was to ease the administrative burden for customers and ourselves associated with our quarterly release system.  Oh, and it should never, ever leave a customer in a lurch.

But, as they say, “Hang-ups and Bang-ups can happen to you“.

We did run into a localization issue just after 2009.1 shipped, one that required a bit of creative thinking to resolve.  Yet by the end of May, we were all fairly amazed that the contract licensing transition had gone so smoothly.  We ran weekly reports, looking for any errors reported by the licensing system, and contracted customers who might encounter issues.  There were small items for us to tweak here and there.  Nothing major.

So imagine our surprise when, three months after deployment, we encountered a completely unexpected situation.  Suddenly, an event, an event which had executed successfully thousands upon thousands of times in those three months, failed.  Nothing literally blew up.  Even so, the licensing system had just done something that, by design, should have been impossible.

The good news?  The customer was able to manually update ePublisher’s license keys and make a scheduled delivery.

The bad news?  Now that we could see the pattern, this event had been occurring consistently over the past three months.  It was just that the system never failed twice in a row (built-in retry mechanisms kicked in!).  However, if the system encountered two succeeding errors, ePublisher happily unregistered the user and deleted the installed keys!?!

After analyzing the problem, we determined changes are required in ePublisher’s client-side code.  Great!  But such a change won’t help users of our 2009.1 and 2009.2 releases.  So, we did a bit more thinking, found a way to address the problem on our side of the fence, and join the high fliers who soar to high heights.

So what have I learned from this experience?  Perhaps I didn’t learn a lesson so much as find a reminder.

One can never choose when and how to meet adversity.  All one can do is choose the response.

We’ll just commit to continuing to work hard and respond to whatever challenges come our way.

Looking back, I came away from SxSWi understanding that everyone attending was on a quest to create emotional connections.  More than a few vendors present were literally banking on this fact.  People want to feel connected.  People want community.

Most would say “Ben, that’s rather obvious.”  My wife Kavita is one of “those people”. But I think there are others like me who have a little trouble “getting it”.  We focus first on content and meaning, not tears and empathy.

So how did I become an apostle of emotional connectedness at SxSW Interactive?

It started in a session on The Ecosystem of News.  Dry stuff, right? No! Not if you consider that we are witnessing the migration of news reporting away from organizations and toward regular people. Regular people, whose shared interests and experiences will provide insight and excitement beyond what a non-specialized journalist could ever accomplish.  Regular people will be better reporters because they care about their subject.  Stories will be judged less on grammar and more on heart.  This idea that emotion matters more than anything continued as I moved on to a session titled Microformats: A Quiet Revolution.  Microformats? Yep.  A simple extension to HTML markup that enables you to leave a bit of yourself on the web.  So that someone can find you.  So that someone can connect with you.

Still not seeing it?

Okay, then take the design and marketing sessions.  Brand Noir: Crafting a Who-Why-How Dunnit talked about the mechanics of branding, identity, etc.  Lots of detail, lots of big company names and budgets.  Yet the take way was this…

Have an emotional impact on people.

Don’t believe that is important?  Then give Designing for Irrational Behavior panelist Peter Whybrow’s “American Mania” a read. Finally, try experiencing the ultimate dichotomy, Designers and Developers: Why Can’t We All Just Get Along? Hearing the panelists discuss their shared struggle to create greatness enabled me to express the conundrum:

Developers wish their creations to be complete.
Designers wish their creations to have emotional impact.

Emotion versus Completion.  Even I “get” who the winner is here. Seeing this contrast so clearly was a huge breakthrough for me.  I’m a developer. Completion is what I’m all about.  But someone like me isn’t going to build a service like Twitter.  Someone like me isn’t going to build a bookmarking site like the old Ma.gnolia. Why would I?  They are incomplete.  They focus on “flash” over “substance”.

They connect with people emotionally.

We need to use ePublisher as a means to connect people emotionally.  To build communities.

Don’t think that’s possible?

Then check out what Andrew (@avanconas) has been doing in his Web 2.0 and ePublisher webinars.  Think about how you can connect your documentation to wikis for feedback, your blogs for insight, and your Twitter accounts via RSS for up to the minute information.

Now imagine using all of those tools and your deliverables to build a community.  A community that connects like minds through the shared interest of your content.

Let’s go create passionate communities.  Clicking “Publish” is all it takes to get started.