How do you make the best use of human strengths and those of the computer?
IT processes and the products that come with them are impossible to imagine away from society and business today. There are few facets of daily life, visible or invisible, that never come into contact with automation — from an instant notification on your phone to a bank transaction or submitting your annual meter readings by email. And that is only what the end user sees; far more is automated than you would suspect. Yet for many people IT and software remain magical and incomprehensible.
Gaining insight and validating processes
Everyone knows a lot happens behind the “digital screens”, but what exactly is a mystery to most people. And that is fine: not everyone has the same interest in or aptitude for technology. Software is still often built on the magic-box principle: the user provides input and the software returns an action or an output. The user has no idea how the results come about, and simply has to trust the system.
There are various reasons for a manufacturer to opt for a closed system: protecting intellectual property, shielding users from human error, development by external parties or by someone who no longer works at the company. Sometimes the software is simply inherited, from a merger or another department. In every case much the same problem arises: the user or administrator has a piece of software that is integral to getting the work done, but no insight into what actually happens inside it. So the user cannot validate whether the outcome is correct, or how that output came about.
Where that check is possible, it is often only visible within the technical context of the system itself, usually as scripts or extensive configuration files. It is like inspecting the cogs in your watch to find out why the time is wrong, while the person who ought to be doing the checking usually has functional knowledge of the processes rather than technical knowledge of the system. The question, after all, is not whether the software works properly; the question is whether it acts properly.
IT works when you can trust the functionality
Managing exponentially growing data flows
Which brings us back to how deeply IT is woven into our society. If IT touches every discipline and every company, does it not create a serious risk when much of that IT is not directly visible and understandable to the people working with it? Human judgement, control and requirements have to be the leading factor at all times. In the end, IT is a tool.
Creating insight and understanding sounds obvious, but it is not always easy. The volume of data and the processes around it in the digital landscape are growing. Fast. These days we hear terms like information architecture and big data more and more often, and the data drifting through our digital landscape can fairly be called “big”. Total internet data storage has grown exponentially in recent years, by roughly twenty to thirty per cent annually. The same goes for the data our everyday IT systems work with: smartphones, computers and smart devices such as Google Home, Alexa and Fitbit.
And since this article is about visualisation, exponential growth makes a nice example — its real impact is sometimes hard to picture. Let us visualise it with a simple sheet of A4, 0.05 mm thick, that we double exponentially: after the first doubling the stack is 0.1 mm, after two doublings a mere 0.2 mm. Nothing shocking at first, but after around 45 doublings you reach the moon, and by seventy doublings you have to start counting in light years to keep track.
The possibilities of in-depth data visualisation
Keeping track: this is where the strength of IT lies. The right hardware and software handle enormous numbers perfectly well and have no trouble finding order and patterns in volumes of data that are overwhelming to the average person. But that software always has to be set up around the wishes and needs of a human being. A human hand steering it is essential. So there has to be a link between the software and the user, so that the user gets exactly the information he or she needs to move both themselves and the software forward. The right visualisation is crucial here, because too much raw information is simply too complex for the human brain.
A log analyser can reduce enormous log files to readable graphs and timelines in which anomalies stand out clearly. Node-based editors make it possible to drag scripts together visually without looking at a single line of code. By standardising automations and processes in BPMN diagrams, for instance, and using those as input for software systems, people can always work from a functional starting point they understand, which the software can then scale to its heart’s content. That way you use the strengths of the human and those of the computer.
People stay at the centre
The demand will only grow
As long as the IT landscape keeps growing, so will the wish and the need for clear insight. We have certainly not exhausted the possibilities, and we will have to allow for solutions to problems that do not even exist yet. But we are well on our way — as long as we stay sharp on one thing: however large the digital world becomes, the human user stays at the centre. Only then do we get the maximum out of both worlds.
