Lessons of Ennis are good for business

Information Age Services is one success to have emerged from the Ennis project, writes Karlin Lillington

Like the dotcom boom, the Eircom Information Age Town project now seems a distant memory. But it hasn't entirely disappeared - and its legacy lives on in a new company that wants to offer guidance to organisations undertaking big information technology projects.

For those whose memories have grown dim, Ennis won the hotly-contested designation of Eircom Information Age Town (IAT) in 1997, just as the boom was taking off, and was consequently showered with £15 million (€19 million) in information and communications technology products and services. Talk was wide-eyed and excited - with much made of the potential of electronic wallets, intranets, websites and PCs at a subsidised £260 for every resident and business.

But the sheen dulled as various hiccups in acclimatising the town to the technology were widely reported in the media, and experiments that did not work got far more coverage than those that did.

Such a varied range of projects were undertaken that sometimes, the public inside and outside Ennis seemed to find it hard to latch on to what the big picture was about. An independent survey on the success of the project four years later showed that 52 per cent of a sample of the Ennis population did not know if the project had attained its goals. On the other hand, some 31 per cent felt it had.

At the time of the survey, the chief executive of the Information Age Town project, Mr Michael Byrne, was satisfied with the 31 per cent figure, saying Ennis people were using PCs and the internet at twice the national average.

Today, six years after IAT was initiated, he notes that the project was an experiment in introducing technologies on a community-wide scale, which had never been done before. In all, the project involved 610 businesses, 87 communities, two local authorities, 13 schools and 20,000 residents.

For Mr Byrne, what did not work during the life of the project was always as important, and informative, as understanding what created successes, he says. And that's where the new company comes in. He's taken that accumulated knowledge and formed a firm, Ennis Information Age Services, or EIAS (www.eias.ie), that starts up this month as a joint venture company, limited by guarantee.

"We started thinking: 'What are the things that are unique and different that we now know, that other people couldn't do?'," he says. "We realised that we understood the enormous gap that exists between technology and the end user. It can disempower people."

He offers the example of the electronic purse, an idea much hyped in the early days of the Web. In Ennis, "trials had proved the consumer was unconvinced". There was a great enthusiasm for smart cards that could be charged with value from a person's bank account, Mr Byrne says, and 300 merchants in town signed up to use the purse system.

"But people realised pretty soon that the person in line with the cash got out faster than they did," he says. "Context needs to be considered." Apply an electronic wallet to paying for parking, a situation where it is inconvenient to find change, and it suddenly has real value, he says.

This is the often elusive or ignored quality of useability, keeping in mind the human dimension of a technical service or product.

For some reason, few people follow even the most basic useability guidelines in designing a Web service, says Mr Byrne. He feels that one thing the IAT project definitely produced, with its audience of 20,000 citizens, was a solid working knowledge of what makes a website or technology product useable.

"We knew this was a service we could sell to governments and service providers," he says.

EIAS believes service providers can also benefit from greater website useability. Mr Byrne offers the example of share traders working on a trading room floor, who use specialised trading programs to buy and sell stock at lightning speed.

Improve useability even fractionally so that a trader can execute trades slightly faster, and the trader could "earn a small fortune", he says.

"Even in areas where there are fairly robust services, organisations haven't been very good at promoting them," says Mr Byrne. Therefore on-line marketing - and marketing of on-line services - is also a focus for EIAS.

On-line banking, for example, is well-established and offers great attractions, the ability to bank at any time. "But only about 10 per cent of bank customers use Net banking," Mr Byrne says. He thinks this is because banks make it awkward for users to get on-line to begin with and then keep requiring them to submit paperwork or talk to other departments to get work done. And, they often offer on-line services that are not very imaginative or that everyone already provides (on-line mortgage calculators, for example).

"As often as not, useability is about process change," he says.

Organisations have to rethink the way they function internally to fit better with an on-line service they wish to offer customers. Likewise, information on websites is often structured to reflect corporate or organisational structure, rather than to accommodate the service needs of a customer.

Or websites provide pointless services that offer no convenience to a customer. "For example, the government might let you apply for the driver's test on-line. But what they give you is a very fast way of joining a very slow queue. Selecting the service to put on-line is important."

EIAS, based in Ballymaley Business Park in Ennis, has several clients, including the Revenue Commissioners. It is aiming at the Irish market over the next six to nine months, says Mr Byrne, then the British market.

"What we're bringing to the table is a very rich experience and we'd be very ambitious," he says.