Are Your Digital Joists Beveled?
Living in a house more than a century old has its fair share of surprises. This week’s unpleasant surprise was a main bathroom pipe failing, causing the demolition of an entire bathroom.
Taking out the floor right down to the bare boards led to a discovery that delighted our contractors: the joists in the floor are beveled.
I learned that this is a sign of good workmanship. By shaving the floor joists to a point, it allows the sand and concrete of the wet-bed to create a stronger platform for the tile floor and everything that happens on top of it.
Obviously it works. For over a century, families living in our house used that room, and it survived generations of traffic and changes effortlessly. Vanities, toilets, cast-iron heating elements, and pipe replacements have come and gone, while the floor has remained in tact. Largely due to the forethought of beveling the joists.
As you may guess, I stood staring at these artifacts from the late 1800′s and thought about what a perfect analogy this makes for digital.
The programming that goes on deep in the back office is often overlooked and undervalued. The SQL work, the strategy and programming that brings the database through a service like .net to an SOAP web service…
Your eyes are glazing already. I can feel it.
Yet glossing over these details is why so many companies continue to falter, or worse, simply not compete where it comes to evolving their brand digitally. Obsessed with the latest, brightest, and shiniest, years later executives wonder why every new effort feels like “recreating the wheel.”
The fact is, they were never standing on a solid foundation of programming. From the enterprise all the way out to the mini-site; the companies who put the resources and time behind creating that unshakable substructure are the companies able to incrementally and more quickly adapt to the ways the people use the room that is the brand.
Yesterday’s affiliate programs are today’s widgets. The ways car companies made systems with unified interfaces across dealerships are today’s Web services.
My bathroom has been updated by every passing generation. The work done to bevel the joists at the outset is what has allowed those changes to happen while the house has endured.
This is one of the reasons why I’m proud to call Emerge my working home. Our project managers and programmers, without fail, deliver consistently beautiful work no one will ever see, but many will trust their experience to blindly. As they should.
Our strategy starts with making sure that the joists are more than well constructed: they’re beveled to last a lifetime.
The devices and interfaces users interact with will change over time. The brands that consistently win will continue to do so because there’s workmanship and forethought in the details of their digital foundation. Changing the sink or the lighting, or trying Twitter, or making a mobile experience, or a facebook application can all be installed and un-installed without having to find a whole new way to carry the weight every time a change is made.
Is your interactive agency beveling the joists?
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