Question: Dogfooding is the process of using a product or idea that you develop or promote. The term arose in the 1980s in the software industry when someone observed that the company wasn't using the product it developed. Or "they weren't eating their own dog food." Wikipedia attributes the term to Brian Valentine, test manager for Microsoft LAN Manager in 1988, but I recall using the term before that date. Whatever its origin, if, of their own accord, employees choose to dogfood their own product or idea, many believe that product oridea is likely to succeed. You may be asking, "So what?" Well, this text was developed by a collaborative team, using Office 365 Professional and many of the techniques described in Chapter Extensions 1 and 2.
When this text was revised every other year, we could get by using the telephone, sending email, and placing documents on file servers. We weren't as productive as we could have been, but it worked. When we decided, because of the rapid change of technology, to produce a new edition of this text every year, we realized that our collaboration system wouldn't do. To see why, consider Figure 2-9, which shows a BPMN diagram of the process we use to transform draft chapters in Word, PowerPoint, and PNG image formats into PDF pages. As you now know, the process starts with the thin-lined circle in the top left and ends with the thick-lined circle near the bottom right. The dashed lines represent the flow of data from one activity to another. This diagram shows five roles. The author works closely with the developmental editor, who ensures that the text is complete and complies with the market requirements, as specified by the acquisitions editor. You can use the knowledge you have from this chapter to interpret this diagram. As you do so, consider the number of documents and versions of documents that are created.
For example, this text includes more than 300 figures. On average there might be three versions of each, or more than 900 figure versions. On average, there are about 10 versions of every chapter and chapter extension, or more than 320 text documents to track. Using email and a file server for storage, considerable confusion can ensue when managing all of these, especially in the rapid development pace that an annual edition requires. Further, when task requests, e.g., "Review Chapter 2 and submit to the developmental editor," are delivered via email, they are easily lost. Dropped tasks and incorrect versions of documents and art are not common, but they do occur. For this text, the development team decided to eat its own dog food and learn from this BPMN diagram. We also decided to dogfood Office 365 Professional (see Chapter Extension 2) for the production of this text. During this process, the author, the developmental editor Laura Town, and the production editor Kelly Loftus met frequently on Lync. Figure 2-10 shows a typical Lync meeting. Notice that the three actors in this process are sharing a common whiteboard.
Each can write or draw on that whiteboard. At the end of the meeting, the whiteboards were saved and placed on the team's SharePoint site to be used as minutes of the meeting. All documents are placed in SharePoint libraries. Figure 2-11 shows the library that was used to create this chapter of this book. SharePoint will manage and integrate simultaneous updates to Office documents like Word and Excel. It does not do so for Acrobat documents, however. Consequently, when I began work on theAcrobat document,I checked it out as noted in Figure 2-11. All of the team libraries were set up so that when team members place documents into a library, SharePoint automatically creates a new version of those documents, including the name of the person, the date and time the version was created, and optional comments. In this way it is possible to know who did what to which version of the document. SharePoint maintains all versions, and it is possible to back up to any prior version quite easily. Figure 2-12 shows the version of this chapter that existed at the time I wrote this sentence. That's dogfooding
1. In your own words, define dogfooding. Do you think dogfooding is likely to predict product success? Why or why not? When would dogfooding not predict product success?
2. Explain how the presence of the BPMN diagram in Figure 2-9 and the use of SharePoint for the creation of this text are examples of dogfooding.
3. Summarize the ways that this text's development team used information systems technology to improve its process efficiency. 2-7. The case doesn't say, but how do you think the annual production of this text contributes to the publisher's and the author's competitive strategy?
4. How does the use of information systems technology contribute to the publisher's and the author's competitive strategy?