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Tech vs UX – Why the struggle?

We live in a world of digital full service agencies and companies that deliver the full brand experience, from a complex technical backend to a fancy frontend. This requires specialists of opposing fields with very contradicting backgrounds to closely collaborate in order to achieve great goals.

Impressive success stories of cross functional teams, where UX designers and software engineers cooperate happily are widely spread [3, 4]. Just as descriptions on how to organize this way [1, 2]. However, these success stories rather document the exception. Truth is that most agencies are struggling with this organization of team collaboration. In order to understand this problem, let’s have a look where the two professions came from.

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By Karsten Jahn, ago

Knowledge Management Strategies

Large parts of my PhD thesis are based on a theory by Morten T. Hansen, Nitin Nohria, and Thomas Tierney [1]. In their article the authors analyze different consulting companies and define two basic strategies for knowledge management: The codification and the personalization. An organization has to follow one of those, the one that fits to the competitive strategy best.

Note: Most of the text from this post is directly taken from my PhD thesis. That is also the reason why this text is so long and detailed…
Sorry for that. 🙂
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By Karsten Jahn, ago

Scrum Product Owner

Last week I attended a course for my certification as a Scrum Product Owner, held by Craig Larman. He is very inspiring and taught us in two days the details of scrum and about the responsibilities of a product owner. The underlying concept of scrum is a high ability to learn and change, which helps to improve and provides a competitive advantage. Being agile makes changes easy and cheap.

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By Karsten Jahn, ago

Knowledge Management in Software Development

Last Thursday, I successfully defended my PhD thesis [1]. My PhD studies were supervised by Peter Axel Nielsen and took part in the Research Centre for Socio-Interactive Design of the Computer Science Department of Aalborg University. The committee members that assessed my thesis were Keld Bødker, John Krogstie and Jan Stage. The defence itself consisted of a presentation of my research for 45 minutes, followed by almost two hours of examination.

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By Karsten Jahn, ago

Du bist was Du isst

In meinem ja inzwischen nicht mehr allzukurzem Leben habe ich mich nicht immer gut ernährt. Aber wohl selten so schlecht wie zur Zeit. Mein ganzer Fokus liegt auf meiner Abschlussarbeit. DafĂĽr vernachlässige ich mich selbst leider bisschen. Schlimm ist, dass das auch noch relativ bewusst geschieht. Sehenden Auges, sozusagen. An Read more…

By Karsten Jahn, ago

The Wiki Way

Ward Cunningham was searching for a new way of collaboration while he was cooperating on the Design Patters book by the Gang of Four. He came up with a very simple web application for collaboration. Legend has it that Cunningham attended a conference in Honolulu while he was working on his system. And when the shuttle bus at the airport arrived, he had a name for it. The bus transfer is called “wiki wiki”, after the Hawaiian word for very quick.
That’s how he called his system: The wiki wiki web.

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By Karsten Jahn, ago