Business and organizational aspects of HCI (HW) - Research Paper Example

IBMS HCI BUSINESS AGENDA AND ITS COMPETITORS Today’s era is witnessing technological advancements by leaps and bounds. The technology over the internet is paving way for the businesses to establish portals, information sites and different means of business exchange. Such websites provide the consumers with information for social interactions, commercial transactions, and searching and gathering of information. The concept of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) has emerged in the midst of this evolving technological future.

With focus on usability engineering methods, HCI has evolved to include the understanding of interaction between people, technology, businesses and work practices. IBM’s HCI research is the most extensive to date. The company has designed its business agenda around HCI. The challenge that IBM faced was to treat their employees as the most valuable asset that can be turned into the company’s competitive edge. The design of IBM is visualized on the belief that future social collaboration functions will be sophisticated making consumer access and commercial services cost-effective over the internet.

Since at IBM, design is the vital component for products and services to be successful, the affects of the design directly impact the product use, service cost and customer loyalty. For this purpose, the designs of IBM are focused on providing user experienced services to the customers. The designs at IBM are built to tackle the architectural issues of large-scale information portals and cities that are opened for social and economic commerce. The IBM Services such as Dojo Globalization, IBM Lotus Sametime 8.

5, and Dojo Enhanced Grid help the businesses for integration of people is based on the HCI.The development of technologies that allows for speech recognition, and interaction designs, the HCI research at IBM is there since 20 years. IBM designs it HCI technologies from disciplines of computer science, sociology, industrial design, anthropology and psychology to provide on-site collaborations with its users and other customers. Some of the research projects of IBM on HCI are Koala which uses the HCI technology to record and share business processes over the Web between different users; Unified Activity Management is used to understand how the employees plan, manage and share their activities amongst themselves; and Shape Writing technology is the new and latest in HCI technology which highlights the importance of users’ interaction with mobile phones, PDAs, and handheld devices.

As IBM is a business and consumer solution provider, it has laid great emphasis on the research of HCI and built its business vision on it which can be seen from the research projects it has undertaken. Microsoft, the main competition of IBM is also increasingly spreading its wing in the HCI domain. Microsoft predicts that by the year 2020, the humans and computers will come so close that fundamentals on which HCI was found will change as the terms interface and users will merge together. The rules regarding the human interaction with machines will change as techno-dependency grows.

Microsoft, like IBM is researching extensively in the HCI technologies with projects such as Skinput which aims to use human body as an input surface, user-interface design for a P2P backup application, and others. As more and more businesses such as IBM and Microsoft, design their business agendas around HCI, it can be expected that humans will no longer in control of the world around them. ReferencesChang, J. (2010). CHI 2010 Highlights HCI Diversity. Microsoft Research. Retrieved 07/18/10 from http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/chi2010-041210.

aspxHuman Computer Interation. IBM Research. Retrieved 07/18/10 from http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research.nsf/pages/r.hci.spotlight.htmlIBM research website. Design @ IBM. Retrieved 07/18/10 http://www-01.ibm.com/software/ucd/index.htmlPerlman, G. (2007) HCI Bibliography. Retrieved 07/18/10 from http://www.hcibib.org/hci-sites/