Simplicity in design, based on customer input, is a strategic focus at IBM. Building ease of use into the customer experience with our offerings is at the core of our e-business on demand strategy.

After developing a world-class User-Centered Design (UCD) process and successfully driving its adoption and execution across the company, we now have an enhanced version, called User Engineering (UE), optimized for the on demand environment. It provides the lens through which customer changes can be sensed.

The processes and methods of UE help us to understand business and user goals, tasks, and requirements, which are subsequently rigorously modeled, and then engineered into offerings, while continuously being evaluated by users. The approach is crucially important to achieving the on demand elements of integration and autonomic computing and to ensure that core business processes are integrated inside and outside an organization. It also improves efficiency by having systems increasingly assume time-consuming and error-prone user tasks.

This issue of the IBM Systems Journal is devoted to providing an overview of our work in this important area.

Nicholas M. Donofrio