ExO Attribute #5: Interfaces - The Daily PPILL #424
How do your customers engage with you? How do employees? How do partners go about their tasks to add value to your product or service and get it to the market in a way that's better to consume?
We used to do many of these with the help of people. People are the ultimate tool to link together separate processes and organizations. They can adapt to whatever communication is necessary at the time, emphasize what's critical, and in many cases, also do some of the work that just no one else is doing. People are the ultimate “general purpose” processor.
But people are also expensive, and they can get bored or tired with repeating the same tasks over and over again. And as it is evident to anyone who has ever played “telephone”, they are prone to error, and sometimes unreliable.
To speed up organizations, make them more efficient, and less prone to error, we cut the game of telephone, and we make the line shorter.
And by using new technologies, we can make the complex simple. Either what your users interact with or what other systems interact with. For users, the user interface (UI) is the visual part of the software application that they see (this is changing as more natural language interfaces come online) and the user experience (UX) is the way they interact with the system. For systems, application programing interfaces (APIs) are the code-based connections your systems will have with external (or internal) systems in order to gather and exchange data and functionality.
It is not about eliminating humans. It is about eliminating LAYERS, interfacing directly, and ensuring that processes are repeatable reliably. Who doesn't want that?