bovacon - Designing Business Interaction

Home

News

References

Team

Contact

 

 

 

 

Change Management

Knowledge Engineering

User Experience

Interaction Design

Process Engineering

 

 

Banner Designing Business Interaction

Banner photo

 

About bovacon

Bovacon helps its customers providing better products and services to their customers. We increase the understanding of the customers across all touch points in order to drive innovation. We bring customer closer to the brand, design innovative products and services, and optimize internal design and development processes.

Regardless whether you call this open innovation management, business modeling, service design, user experience or process optimization – it must help our customers. That’s why we work pragmatically and result-oriented.

 

NEW: Brand and Innovation Marketing Clinics

Our new service offer addresses the key issues of long-term branding and marketing strategy and process improvement – by delivering actionable results.

We start, where brand, advertising and creative agencies stop. 

It’s not only about corporate design, colors and brand values. We believe it’s about:

» How your brand is experienced by the customer
» How you are managing the brand and marketing activities
» Increasing effectiveness and effiniency

» Reducing time-to-market costs

Our new service portfolio offers four services:
» Brand and Marketing Process Health Check
» Brand and Marketing Process Consulting
» Brand Experience Health Check
» Brand and Marketing Management Systems


Interested? Contact us or read for more details!

 

Interaction on all levels

bovacon is a privately owned company focused on improving business interaction as well as organizational and human performance on all levels:

» Interaction between business groups, such as organizational units and teams
» Interaction between individuals in the organization
» Interaction between individuals and information
» Interaction between individuals and supporting IT systems and tools

This holistic approach allows us to identify the core roots of problems and provide long lasting solutions.

 

Our Services

We provide consulting, design, implementation and coaching in:

» Change Management
» Knowledge Engineering
» User Experience
» Interaction Design
» Process Engineering

We are based in Berlin, Germany. Through a flexible network of consultants we provide our services all over the world.


Contact Us!

 

News and Events

» 15. July 2013 – New Website
We set up a new website at www.uxberlin.com and www.uxberlin.com/de (for the German version). It contains an overview and downloads of Hennings publications and information on the Business Modeling Starter Kit. Enjoy!

» 12. November 2012 – Business Models
Within the lecture series on entrepreneurship at the Technical University Berlin we present and practise our approach to business models. Come and join or check out the slidedeck.

» 18. October 2012 – Lean Venturing
We created a new offering named "Lean Venturing" for coaching corporate ventures and their steering. A process and a set of methods combine business modeling approaches with organizational learning practises. Theory and cases we will present at ISPIM 2012 Symposium in Seoul.

» 20. June 2012 – Learning from the Future
Action for Innovation - Innovating from Experience: This is the title of this years conference of the society for professional innovation management ISPIM 2012. We will participate with a new approach to develop and utilize future scenarios as means for innovation development and organizational learning. Come and join us in Barcelona!

» 24. April 2012 – Innovation Forum
The Innovationforum Berlin, set up for and with Telekom Innovation Laboratories received the Best Practice Award for Online Research - also thanks to our colleagues who delivered a great presentation! A short description of the Innovationforum and its activities has just been published online in German. The full paper in English you may download here.

» 10. March 2012 – User-Driven Business Modeling
Our new workstream on business modeling is going public. Think about the value proposition, customer segments and touchpoints of your business; model revenue and costs, and configure core capabilities, partnering networks. Our approach (developed with Telekom Innovation Laboratories) starts with structured ideation and benchmark studies and reaches from storytelling and prototypes to detailed business process models. The paper was presented at the IADIS conference on eSociety 2012.

» 29. September 2011 – Mindfulness for Innovation - Publication and conference
In cooperation with ICL Interventions for Corporate Learning we bring together two approaches to strategic learning in the face of uncertainty: Future Research (FR) as a set of methodologies to imagine and elaborate on future developments within companies and their environment, and High Reliability Organizing (HRO) as an approach to cultivate collective mindfulness. At SKM Conference on Competence-based Strategic Management in Linz we present new challenges and capabilities required to identify and exploit opportunities for innovation. You may download an extended version of the paper here.

» 20. July 2011 – Publications and conference presentations on future scenarios
Some of our recent works systematically explore alternative future developments in telecommunication, mobile human-computer interaction, and learner-centered design. Henning published results and presents use cases for ubiquitous learning at the international conferences ED-Media in Lisbon. His latest contribution is on future scenarios in strategic consulting and will be presented at IADIS International Conference on Telecommunications, Networks and Systems in Rome.

» 8. July 2011 – User-Driven Innovation at Telekom Innovation Laboratories
Henning continues to manage and extend a project field focussing on user-driven innovation and interactive system development at Deutsche Telekom Laboratories . Within more than three dozen projects we introduced and conducted ethnographic user research, user clinics, ideation and futures workshops, online panels, scenario process and developed new HCI and participatory research methods.

» 18. February 2011 – Lectures and exercises at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam
Henning gave another class on strategic user research for students of interface design in Potsdam. This semesters focus topics: Contextual inquiries to gather user requirements, and futures scenarios to explore design concepts for mobile learning. Thanks to one of the students you may explore some of the classes content here.

» 10. December 2010 – Bovacon develops new strategies of how to improve project reporting and controlling
For an innovation department of a large telekom provider we developed new strategies of how to improve project reporting and controlling, considering specifics of innovation projects and given organizational structures and processes. We combined methods like rolling budget, agile monthly sprints and simplified project scoring using our pragmatic approach to solving organizational challenges.

» 30. November 2010 – Bovacon identifies possibilities for improving intranet usage at a large telekom provider
Based on our previous engagement where we identified possibilities for improving the intranet usage at an innovation department of a large telekom provider, we started a project reorganizing the intranet and supporting a technical migration to the new version of the MS SharePoint.

» 5.-7. October 2010 – Bogo presents at the IAF (International Apparel Federation) conference in Hong Kong
Bogo gave a talk with the title "Social Media in the apparel industry" at the IAF Conference in Hong Kong. Doing this he opened a new way to answer the conference theme question: "How retailer brands, internet and green manufacturing are transforming fashion business".

» 23. September 2010 – Bogo wins the IA Conference audience award
Bogo received an award for his talk on the IA Conference in Cologne, May 2010. In his talk, titled "Riding on the Storm – A Survival Guide for IAs to Service Design", Bogo took a critical view on the actual buzzword "service design" and dared forecasts of how to survive future buzzwords.

» 20. September 2010 – Bovacon starts working on agile management and developmentmethods at a large European utility provider
We started a new project leading implementation and roll-out of agile management and development methods at a large European utility provider. We support pilot projects by providing leading, coaching and training, we develop a methods toolbox with an active collaboration community, and make agile project management practices and integral part of the companys project management practices.

» July 2010 – Bovacon is working on "Afghanistan today"
Bovacon has done a conceptual design for the MICT project website Afghanistan today, including a social media integration and strategy. The Afghanistan-Today is a live platform for Afghanistan journalists-in-training to publish their original articles.

» 22. June 2010 – Selection and roll-out of a project management tool
We started a project defining a project management and reporting tool for program and portfolio management at a large company with several dozent projects. The goal is to improve efficiency by reducing administrative and data management efforts.

» 16. June 2010 – Bogo presented at a Mitarbeiterportale Conference
Bogo gave a talk with the title "How much Facebook does a company need" at a MiPo 2010 conference in Schloß Kapfenburg. Bogo talked how company intranets and internal corporate communication can benefit from Social Media and presented several examples. He also warned against using a Facebook as a company intranet and communication tool.

» 12. May 2010 – Bogo presented at a Information Architecture Conference in Cologne
At the German Information Architecture conference Bogo gave a talk titled "Riding on the Storm – A Survival Guide for IAs to Service Design". Bogo took a critical view at the service design buzz, compared it with User Experience and Information Architecture and provided tips on how to stay on top of all buzzwords and survive in the future.

» April 2010
For our partner MICT we did a conceptual design and project management for a DAAD website www.tabadul.de. The website supports the process of awarding scholarships to Iraqi-Students at German universities. Although a relatively simple website, the complex subject, languages and the process roll-out made this a very interesting and fun project.

» 9. April 2010 – Strategic User Research.
Henning starts a new lecture at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam. It is a theoretical, methodological and hands-on introduction into strategic user research and related issues of open innovation and futures studies.

» 26. March 2010 – Website Project Iraq.
Supporting our friends from MICT International we started to work on an international website project to be launched for Iraq.

» 22. October 2009 – agile project management review.
In a project for a large bank we conducted a thorough review of a large software development project that introduced agile methods at the bank. We assessed the state of the project, maturity of the implementation of agile methods, and provided recommendations on how to proceed.
In the last couple of years we coached and managed several implementation of agile methodologies in large projects in complex environments. When the time allows, we will deliver a summarized report with collected best practices and pitfalls.

» 19. October 2009 – Conference Keynote
Bogo gave an opening keynote speech at The Finnish Technical Communications conference in Tampere. Bogo talked about user communities, their impact on technical communication and user assistance and provided foresights for the future. Later on he gave another talk on how the user assistance community can benefit from methods used by information architect.

» 15. October 2009 – Project Portfolio and Reporting Tool
For a strategic department of a large telecom provider we are starting a project to define management and reporting needs for a portfolio of projects. The project will include process and data needs analysis, conceptual dashboard design and tool selection and implementation support.

» 15. July 2009 – agile methods implementation at a large banking project
Introducing agile methods to large projects with 30 plus members in a complex banking environment is a challenge. Based on our experience in software engineering and management of complex projects, we will be coaching agile development and detailing the methodology for a large bank.

» 19-24 July 2009 - HCIi
At
HCI International 2009 in San Diego, California, we will present two of our latest works. A full aper on "Love at First Encounter" addresses the start-up experience with new applications. "Network Effects of Synthetic Services" deals with the generation of value for users by means of synthesizing mobile services in Japan.

» 15 February 2009 – Brand Management System &xnbsp;
For a leading branding agency we designed a conceptual architecture or a Brand Management System (BMS) based on our “Reference Architecture” where we combine best practices from the industry.
Based on this and several other projects dealing with marketing efficiency, process optimization and calculating return on investment, we are combining the experiences into a new service offering – "Brand and Marketing Health Check”

» 12. December 2008 – Bogo was interviewed for a popular podcast
Tom Johnson’s blog and podcast I’d rather be writing is a legend in the field of technical communication. Tom interview Bogo on the role of technical communication in product design and the future trends and needs
Here a link to the interview. For all really paying attention – you can here the coffee shop noises in the background. Bogo was interviewed via skype at his coffee shop karvana.

» 15. October 2008 - Wireless ICT
Henning presents recent developments and trends for mobile applications in Japan at the
WCI conference in Berlin. Usage scenarios related to mobile learning and literature, mobile mangas and TV, QR-Codes, and contactless payment, and the ecosystems these applications create provide lessons to be learned for the European market.

» 4. July 2008 - Educational Technologies
Henning presents his latest research on interactive environments for contextual learning at the
ED-Media World Conference of Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications in Vienna and the IEEE ICALT Conference in Santander, Spain.

» 30. March 2008 - 2D Barcodes
We just completed a study on past experiences and future business prospects for 2D barcodes in Korea and Japan. Linking the physical and the online world use of barcodes is already an indispensable and omnipresent aspect of east asian mobile culture.

» 13. March 2008 - WinWriters conference in Portland, Oregon.
Bogo is an invited speaker at the
WinWriters conference. Bogo will talk about benefiting from Web2.0 practices for corporate communication and user assistance, present an essential toolkit for information architects, and participate at the pundit panel.

» 12. March 2008 - Usability expert panel at Bentley College, USA
As every year, Bogo participates at the usability experts panel at the Bentley College, USA. Together with Joe Dumas, Tom Tullis, Gregg Almquist, Bob Virzi and James Elroy, Bogo will discuss usability profession, trends and experiences with the students of the
Information Design program at Bentley.

» 10. March 2008 - Completed a project on personalization
We just completed a project where we developed personalization concepts for a large consumer portal and conceptualized and detailed several consumer tools. We will present the experiences at several conferences in 2008.

» 8. March 2008 - Quality management project successfully completed
A project for a large car manufacturer in Germany completed. In this complex IT-project we provided quality management and quality assurance support, detailing QM- and QS-processes and supported the teams.

» 6. March 2008 - Usability Conference in Copenhagen
Bogo was an invited speaker at the usability conference in Copenhagne, organized by
DANSK-IT. Bogo talked about experience in involving users into design activities.

» 15. February 2008 - Information Design Journal publishes an interview with Bogo Vatovec
An interview with Bogo, conducted by Saul Carliner during the STC conference, was published in the Information Design Journal, Volume 15, Number 3, 2007.

» 30. January 2008 - Pecha Kucha
Henning will present selected works and stories from our research and consulting activities at the original Pecha Kucha night in Super Deluxe, Tokyo.

» 15. December 2007 - Mobile Contexts
We present our latest paper on mobile systems for contextual learning and the IEICE conference for Educational Technologies in Fukuoka, Kyushu, the southern island of Japan. We focus on the question how mobile technologies can be applied to support learning activities in location, time and user-releated contexts.

» 10. December 2007 - Disaster Prevention
We are participating in an international project to set up an early warning system for natural disasters. Information from various resources and geographically distributed sensors is brought together and visualised in a complex decision support system. Applying expert evaluations and eye-tracking studies our first job was the evaluation and improvement of the preliminary interfaces for the decision maker.

» 30. November 2007 - Migration
We delivered a concept how to inform users about the new features and content on the website of a big German broadcasting network. The concept covers essential information about the relaunch, portraits of new content domains, a quick reference card for printout and structured ways to obtain and analyse user feedback. We are curious about the results.

» 22. November 2007 - Japans Mobile Economy
We conducted our second travel to leading institutions in Japanese IT Research and Development. This time we visited large companies like KDDI, NTT DoCoMo, Sony, NEC, Waseda University, NICT and Bridgestone. We thank our hosts for presenting such innovative topics like fingerbone conduction, powder-based flexible displays, 3D displays, sonic data transmission, free-viewpoint television and many more.

» 1. November 2007 - Pattern Workshops
We prepared and conducted a series of workshops "How to work with Interaction Design Patterns". We explained advantages and potential workflows for the interaction design pattern approach in large companies and provided hand-on experiences. Within the three hour workshops participants learned how to extract patterns from existing solutions and how to apply them in the context of service development.

» 3. September 2007 - Pattern Evaluation
Continuing our work on interaction design patterns as a means to communicate and institutionalize usability issues we conduct an empirical evaluation of working with patterns in cooperation with the
Interaction Design Lab in Potsdam.

» 16. August 2007 - Technology Radar
Scouting for new developments in ICT in Japan we found more than four dozen. For Technology Radar of the
Deutsche Telekom-Laboratories we delivered profiles for upcoming technologies like mobile multiplayer and voice-control games, domestic robotics, and large projected interfaces.

» 28. July 2007 - KDDI
Consolidating cooperations with Japanese R&D we presented our works on early phases of mobile interaction design to Japanese institutions such as
KDDI Research and Development Laboratories.

» 11. April 2007 - Interview with PingMag
The English / Japanese Design Magazine PingMag interviewed Henning in Tokyo and now published an article about his work there. Have a look and feel free to comment on
PingMag . If you want join Henning learning Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji see the Japanese Version.

» 2. February 2007 - Webscore Expert Analysis
In cooperation with the Interaction Design Lab of the University for Applied Sciences Potsdam we conducted an expert evaluation of the prototype and alternative designs within the website redesign of the
Investment Bank of Berlin .

» 25. December 2006 - Successfull 2006 and a great start in the 2007
We are happy to say that the 2007 has been an extremely successfull year for bovacon. We are even more happy to announce the fact that we prolonged contracts with all our clients and acquired new businesses for the 2007.
We wish our clients and other visitors of our website lots of sucess in the New Year.

» 20. October 2006 - 28. February 2007 - Research and Technology Scouting in Japan
Henning is spending 4 months on a research fellowship at the
Waseda University in Tokyo after having received an invitation and award from NICT, the National Institute of Information and Communication Technology, Japan. An update on his activities is posted on our News section.

» 2. October 2006 - Migration Project.
Applying various methods like heuristic evaluations, contextual task analysis and a migration-workshop we accompany the transition of the online activities of a large public radio and television network. The project continues in cooperation with the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam.

» 29. September 2006 - Presentation at the European Information Architecture Summit.
Bogo is delivering a presentation about our study of content adaptation solutions and their impact on information architects and their work.

» 28. September 2006 - Workshop: Introduction to usability.
Expanding services at one of our regular clients with usability. For a client where we regularly work as process and software engineering consultants, Bogo conducted an introductury workshop on usability. The goal is to establish usability as one of the key competencies for the client in the future.

» 27. September 2006 - ICT Perspectives on our aging society.
Henning finished and presented the results of an in-depth study for
German Telekom Laboratories. We conducted a literature study, expert interviews, user studies on the impact of the demographic change to the design and development of information and communication technologies. Results covered latest research findings, prototypes and product evaluations and guidelines for developing technologies suitable for elderly users.

» 18. August 2006 - Online Survey.
We created an online survey on gaming habits and usage of the gamona network
www.gamona.de for Webguidez Entertainment GmbH.

» 7. June 2006 - Redesign of a web portal for a non-profit organization.
As a manager of the STC Information Design and Architecture community, Bogo will be managing the effort of redesigning the STC website.

» 2. June 2006 - Interaction Design Patterns.
We participated in a large commercial research and development project on interaction design patterns to create a unified user experience across applications, platforms and devices. The project is being conducted in cooperation with University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam and the Fraunhofer IAO Stuttgart.

» 5. June 2006 - Keynote at the CIDM Best Practices Conference in September.
Bogo will give a keynote at the Best Practices conference of The Center for Information-Development Management in San Diego, California.

» 1. June 2006 - Presentation at the localization class for Bentley College, USA on June 15.
Bogo will remotely via video-conference present at the localization class at the Bentley College, Boston, USA. The focus will be on the new trends and challenges in the localization and information industry and experiences from Europe

» 25. May 2006 - Keynote at the Citec Information Academy (CIA) on June 14.
Bogo will present his views on the importance of technical communication and future trends at the next Citec Information Academy (CIA) seminar on 14. June 2006 in Helsinki, Finland.

» 12. April 2006 - Eyetracking study for Immobiliensout24
We conducted an eyetracking-evaluation of different design approaches in the redesign of Immobilienscout24 website.

» 31. March 2006 - Content adaption study
We concluded the study on content adaptation solutions for mobile devices. Solutions make it possible to display large websites on a mobile device, but do not make the site necessarily usable.

» 26. March 2006 - ED-Media conference paper
Henning will present a paper at the ED-Media 2006 World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications.

» 16. March 2006 - NICT Award Japan
Henning was granted the NiCT-Award of Japan. In the end of 2006 he will visit the Waseda University Tokyo.

» 10. March 2006 - Technology Review interview
Bogo was interviewed and is featured in two articles in the M.I.T. Technology Review Magazine.

» 3. March 2006 - Inflight entertainment concept
Together with our partner Wunderman we worked on a conceptual redesign of a reach-media inflight entertainment system for a large airline.

» 1. March 2006 - Content adaption project
We just started on a new project: a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of content adaptation solution for mobile devices.

» 1. February 2006 - Multimedia composer study
We finished a user experience study of a multimedia composer application. More details in the News section.

» 25. January 2006 - TCANZ - conference presentation
An article by Mike Unwalla reports from the TCANZ conference in New Zealland where Bogo hold two presentation - see old News.
Download article as PDF.

» 25. January 2006 - Interface design presentation
At the Center for Human-Machine Interaction at the Technical University of Berlin we presented previous works together with the Interaction Design Lab (IDL) Potsdam.

» 27. December 2005 - Project management consulting
Managing large and many projects at the same time is a challenge. In a new consulting project for a software development company, we are defining a program and project management methodology for managing programs and large projects.

» 20. December 2005 - Project management methodology
In a consulting project for one development area of the largest software development companies we are defining the project management methodology and the necessary training for project managers.

» 13. December 2005 - STC organization management
Bogo Vatovec has been nominated a manager of the Society for Technical Communication (STC) Special Interest Group (SIG) Information Architecture and Design. For more information about the STC organization, see
www.stc.org.

 

 

Disclaimer

 

 

 

Schlesische Strasse 28 / 10997 Berlin / T + 49 30 692 05 740 / F +49 30 692 05 7402 / info(at)bovacon.com