They are Simplicity • Agility • Trust • Integrity • Innovation.

It is great to see how gospel related principles will always survive and the key is to create a perfect balance between all those (or similar) principles.

It seems evident to me that pride unfortunately has a lot to do with our use of complexity and complicated processes in the I.T. industry. It can be difficult to give up the temporary sense of power and control that can be felt at times when using complexity and processes that protect us and help us look cool. It takes some of us real faith, humility, and hard work to jump out of our I.T. bubble world to understand the needs of others and in the business world around us.

For example, I have tended to stick religiously with establishing and following process. I would hound and expose other team members when they did not follow established process. After that, I’ve wondered why some people found it difficult or uncomfortable to work with me. As another example, I know it hasn’t been unusual for me and for others to design a report or program without understanding very well how it is really used or why it has some of the logic that it does. Some of this may be because of all that is expected in such a short amount of time, but I’m confident that a fair amount of it is just from being comfortable in my own, little world.

After attending an LDS Tech Talks meeting with my dad, who has worked in the I.T. industry for quite some time, he and I were reflecting more on today’s I.T. engineers compared to I.T. engineers from a decade or two ago. After recognizing some of the good and exciting things that are happening, we were sad to acknowledge that all too often today’s I.T. engineers prefer not to communicate and ask each other questions. Unfortunately, many in the younger generation of internet-savvy engineers would never consider using the wisdom and experience of the older, pre-internet generation for I.T. practices and procedures (that don’t depend on the internet), because the principles of the older generation are looked upon as being overly simple. (I’m speaking as one in the younger generation.) It’s exciting to hear how the Church’s ICS department is opening up communication with the technology community, setting the example and leading the way to the wise and humble path of simplicity.

Well, you probably got to know me more than you expected to, but I imagine there are plenty of others out there like me, and I’m grateful to acknowledge that I can change. On my part, I want to embrace humility and faith to overcome these challenges of pride.

What we have found most useful in adopting a process framework are two aspects: First is the establishment of a consistent vocabulary for the core processes (if you’re going to have jargon, at least have just one!). Second is an emphasis on the needs of the business – which (if truly followed) will force IT to learn to speak the business’ language – and find a way to translate the complexity of the technology into something to which the business can relate.

Chapter 1 is titled “Initial Forays into User Interface Design” and some of the topics deal with:
- Why do you have to click the Start button to shut down?
- Why doesn’t Windows have an “expert mode?”
- The default answer to every dialog box is Cancel
- The best setting is the one you don’t even sense, but it’s there, and it works the way you expect
- In order to demonstrate our superior intellect, we will now ask you a question you cannot answer
- Why doesn’t Setup ask you if you want to keep newer versions of operating system files?
- Thinking through a feature

It is generally good introspective reading for those who design “features” into a software application and expect the users to know what to do.

[JOEL: Thank you for the feedback. We're looking into which are usability problems and which are discoverability problems. We value your feedback a ton. It would be useful for us if you used the feedback tool to give us specific issues. Thank you!]