In a post titled “Robert Scoble doesn’t understand enterprise software,” ZDNet blogger Michael Krigsman lays in to Scoble for having the temerity to ask why business applications can’t be redesigned to be more like consumer applications – fun, friendly, even “sexy.” Sniffs Krigsman:
As an enterprise software blogger … I feel qualified to comment on the issue: Scoble’s question is irrelevant and meaningless. Robert Scoble misses this point: unlike consumer software, where sex appeal is critical to attracting a commercially-viable audience, enterprise software has a different set of goals. Enterprise software is all about helping organizations conduct their basic business in a better, more cost-effective manner. In software jargon, it’s intended to “enable core business processes” with a high degree of reliability, security, scalability, and so on …
When I’m at home using Twitter, a great example of cool consumer software, I want to be delighted, thrilled, entertained, and engaged. When I transfer money through my bank, which is certainly a non-sexy enterprise system, I demand the system work every time without fail. There’s a big difference between enterprise and consumer systems, a lesson I suspect Robert Scoble is about to learn.
I’m sorry, but I think Krigsman is the one who doesn’t understand enterprise software – or at least doesn’t understand what it could become. The distinction he draws between business and consumer applications is specious. Are we really to believe that making software engaging is somehow incompatible with making it reliable and secure? That’s just baloney.
Look, for instance, at a consumer-directed application like Amazon.com’s store. You might quibble with some of Amazon’s design decisions, but it’s a friendly, easy-to-use application that gives each customer a huge amount of power to tailor its workings to his or her particular preferences and needs. And yet the Amazon store processes a vast amount of sensitive data, keeps it secure, is extraordinarily reliable, and is scalable as all get-out. There’s no reason that corporate systems can’t emulate this model. Indeed, many new web-based business applications reflect the simplicity and ease of customization that we’ve come to take for granted in many consumer applications. Hell, even some online banking applications are starting to get much simpler to use and customize.
By perpetuating a false dichotomy between the friendliness of consumer apps and the seriousness of business apps, all that Krigsman is doing is giving enterprise vendors cover for continuing to produce software that’s difficult and unpleasant to use. Give Scoble credit. He’s asking the right question, in his own strange way.
UPDATE: In a follow up, Krigsman says I’m living in a fantasy land. At the same time, though, he admits, “Ultimately, the problem can be solved by software technology that completely isolates the user interface from all other elements of the application, including data, backend services, and so on.” Welcome, Mike, to my fantasy land, which is also sometimes referred to as the 21st century.
No doubt user friendliness is something that enteprise software players need to learn from the consumer world players – startups and bigger players included. Todays’ leading consumer sector players all have aspirations to move into the enterprise space faster. I see huge opportunities in the fusion – the consumerization of enterprise technology has the potential to open up new powerful combinations. The possibilities of such fusion of different worlds may open up good chances for disruptive innovation – this provides a platform for such an ideal fertile ground that can lead up to a potential business model innovation – so enterprises need to be well prepared to capitalize on such possibilities. see my note
http://123suds.blogspot.com/2007/12/enterprise-software-not-significant.html here
Nick – what part about UI and the use of social computing metaphors in Mike’s post did you miss? As regards Scoble – he’s not asking the right question at all. He talks about blogs and CPM, making the fundamentally flawed assumption you can equate consumer to business. You can’t. You’re only talking about a tiny slice of the consumer facing action as you should well know. Pillorying Mike K in this way is specious.
Nick,
I think you are seriously mistaken about this and several other important, global issues. See my blog post for a full, in-depth discussion. ;)
Enjoy.
Nick, I agree with you. There is a lot to be learned in the Enterprise Software space from the consumer world. There are also a lot of benefits to be had by making enterprise software “Sexy.”
http://ekive.blogspot.com/2007/12/enterprise-software-it-doesnt-have-to.html
It depends on how you define “Enterprise Software”. I’m a SAS developer and quite a few of my programs run in the “Enterprise” space. As an example, churn analysis, loyalty management, etc… I write this code on the desktop and port to the mainframe. If you do a little research, you will see a lot of complaints about the SAS UI and how it hasn’t changed much over time. Sexy UI’s make development easier, faster and more efficient. So I think Scoble & Carr both have a point. Btw, is MS Office “Enterprise Software”?
Anshu,
I like your title, though I have to say I saw it coming.
Nick
So, Dennis, you agree that drawing a distinction between engaging software and reliable software is justified and useful?
By the way, I changed the title of this post. The original title was meant as a cheeky play on Krigsman’s title, but I realized that it could take on a life of its own in search results, which would have been unfortunate.
I commented on Michael Krigsman’s blog post that I was recently witness to a SAP meltdown at 150 employee company. I won’t quote verbatim here, but the gist is that the promises never match the burden for small companies when training and usability are factored. Most egregious were the SAP consultants; criminals more like it with a license to steal from the unsuspecting. Ultimately, the client lucked out and found a bright your fellow to weave together some simple Web based apps that give them 90& of what SAP promised them
IS it as integrated as the SAP install could have been? No. Is it in daily use at a fraction of the cost? Yes. Are the people who have to deal with the system on a daily basis happy with it, oh yes.
Nick,
I am glad you like the title. And yes, you had it coming. ;)
Anshu
Nick, give me a break. Your comments ignore a whole lot of realities. My response over at ZDNet:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/projectfailures/?p=525
Michael Krigsman
As a daily user of enterprise software, I can attest that it is unbelievably unfriendly. Nick and Scoble are right on the money; hiding behind transactions, and other technical metrics may make you sound like serious commentator, but that’s it. This is SOA vs. REST from a user interface perspective.
Nick, sorry, you sound like a con-ned-sumer of technology…
http://dealarchitect.typepad.com/deal_architect/2007/12/the-con-sumeriz.html
Right-on Nick.
Enterprise software is about one thing only, that’s delivering business value, most often through a productivity boost.
Ultimately I assert, User Experience has as much (and occasionally more) to do with productivity as functionality.
Jeez, Vinnie, you Enterprise Irregulars are starting to sound like Enterprise Regulars.
I think Krigsman doesn’t like the term “sexy”. “Sexy” doesn’t describe reliability, quality or even value of a piece of software, but describes the degree of hype and public noise. The public perception and talk about a software is all about sales – but at the end of the day it’s the quality of a software moving firms to buy and use it or not.
On the other side, people making decisions on acquisition of an enterprise software are definitely receptive to noise concerning software (mass) markets. So I think this tenor can influence significantly their decision.
It’s all really about engineering methodology:
Enterprise software has a reputation for being lousy to users for the simple reason that so much of it designed by a waterfall method. Somebody writes down a specification of a UI and N months and $K million later there it is, expensively fixed in stone. As Krigsman hints, the motivation for this practice is its reputation as a reliable methodology: the interface to the banking system may be awkward or even painful but events where a software glitch screws up transactions are rare.
Is that reputation deserved or not, in comparison to other ways of building software? That’s kind of an open, academic question. Software engineers in the audience might understand the question as, for example, will modern type-check systems help more agile development styles to produce really trustworthy code? (In some ways, the answer to that was is in and is “yes” but, anyway, that’s the general direction where the future of enterprise software is being decided.)
What seems to be confusing the capitalists, from my perspective, are competing claims that various pieces of new technology are somewhat “silver bullets” that enable a more improvisational, agile development of software that is, nevertheless, of enterprise quality. In other words, the technology is foggy and its hard to assess risk, though everyone strongly suspects things are changing.
Place your bets.
I’d be reluctant to look too casually at something like Amazon and assume that much of what works there is easily transferred to other projects. The reproducibility of the methodologies supposedly responsible for those successes is an open, empirical question. (With all kinds of interesting, complicated, circumstantial evidence on both sides.)
-t
It wouldn’t make sense for enterprise apps to share the same attributes as consumer software: enterprise apps see less competition and the purchase decision makers have different criteria from the users (as 37signals pointed out recently).
There’s some hope: 1) buyers will increase their desire for usable solutions and 2) solutions birthed out of the SMB marketplace, where buyers are users, will appeal gradually more to the enterprise space.
In SK his own words asks:
>> Why is enterprise software often hard to use?
>> Several reasons:
He gave several answers but here’s one he left out: Cost of Maintenance (COM)?
I’ve heard figures in the area of +67% of expenditures for enterprise software are in the maintenance and upgrade phase. Easy to use software that reflects transparent business logic is just not profitable; its revenue that the major vendors bank on. Businesses seem to be able absorb the cost; however, consumers just get infuriated by having to upgrade constantly.
I explored the notion of why people who are exposed daily to high interface and interaction values inherent in TV, movies, advertising, magazines and gadgets in the consumer sphere are somehow supposed to be rendered incapable of expecting and appreciating the same within the walls of the enterprise from 9 to 5, with a dozen enterprise examples that aren’t sexy:
What isn’t sexy enterprise software?
I’m with Nick 100% on this one. I have been involved in many large scale enterprise software projects over the last 10 or so years. One could argue that the majority of the folks who use enterprise applications are probably not the same folks (in general) who use todays web20 consumer web based applications. However what we have learnt from todays’ AJAX based consumer services is that given a good UI, easy navigation and a little sex appeal then the user take up for such services can be significant. Now consider one of the key problems with enterprise software (and CRM software in particular) .. functionally the majority of the enterprise applications work well however the user take up is so often a problem. An organization could spend $millions implementing Siebel and end up with limited user adoption, reduced ROI and overall lack of customer satisfaction.
If we applied todays so called web20 technologies to enterprise application I think we will see increased usability, improved user adoption and in general higher customer satisfaction from both the users and the organization itself.
Many of you may know that SAP has announced a redesign of their CRM solutions to be web20 friendly:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/infoworld/20071204/tc_infoworld/93826.
And for the rest of the organizations that do not use SAP my startup may offer some web20 relief. I am working on a solution which provides the ability for any organization to participate in the web20 world without having to make any changes to their underlying operational systems, at very low cost and (hopefully) significant value to the organization and efficiency increases in employees. If any of you are interested to learn more please contact me directly at : jason at mee-mah dot com.
We are in stealth mode right now but I am interested in talking to anyone who has an interest in what we are doing.
Regards,
Jason
I disagree with Nick on the usability factor. There is a difference in Fancy system and easy to use system. Enterprise systems need not to be a fancy colorful screen, but it must be easy to use for the user. I do come across some functionally good systems but complex user interface to use and unfriendly 25 steps to complete an entry. It is achievable for any enterprise system to improve the usability without compromise on their functional features.
I absolutely believe that enterprise software should be sexy! I am saying this with the understanding that when we say ‘sexy’ we really mean ‘intuitive’. No one cares how ‘cool’ a piece of software looks if it’s unusable and takes drilling down into multiple stacks of menus to accomplish what you want to. We think software is ‘cool’ and/or ‘sexy’ when it’s easy to use. Everyone wants to spend less of their time learning the ins and outs of [non-intuitive] software and more of their time doing value-add work. We should be able to figure out what we need to do with a combination of a few clicks of the mouse and reading the help. I have just recently been part of a successful SAP implementation and can tell you that it works beautifully. But guess who uses SAP most? The really bright people. The ones who compensate with the difficulty of learning SAP with brute-force intelligence. Not everyone who’s using it is highly educated – that’s not a slam or insult it’s an admission of fact. These are the users that concern me. They are the ones that use the system by wrote, removing any chance that they will use it creatively or spontaneously to solve the real-world problems they face daily. As soon as its use falls outside of their procedural training they will fail. Mistakes will be made. They will not be able to apply common sense or more accurately, their basic problem-solving skills to using it to getting their jobs done.
In my mind, enterprise software has failed completely in this respect. It continues to treat its users, especially those on the plant floor, as industrial-age ‘hands’ – without valuable insight into the business processes of which they are the true masters. We, and they, are knowledge-workers. I predict that within the decade enterprise software as we know it will be fast on its way out. Within 25 years it will be relegated to the world today’s mainframes live in. As the shift from the industrial age to the knowledge age intensifies, so will enterprise software’s market share continue to shrink.
Not to make a mountain out of a mole hill, or more of a mountain, and I know there are as many definitions of ‘sexy’ as there are people, but enterprise apps do need sex appeal. There is no way around it. The first iteration of a full client was pretty rough, but over time the user interface must become easier, more configurable/customizable and more pleasant to look at and work with. When talking to the average user in the sales cycle these values are paramount. People want to enjoy software, not tolerate it or fight with it.
Nick, we are not regulars at all. We are constantly pushing the enterprise and enterprise vendors to improve…but there is this naive view out there than a better/more social UI will “fix the enterprise”
if we are going to re-do UI, let’s also be prepared to destroy it for many non value added intermediaries in various processes…blindly Ajazing a web 1.0 or green screen or SaaSing a process is no way to “fix the enterprise” …it is paving the old UI and business process cow path…
see my post this morning
http://dealarchitect.typepad.com/deal_architect/2007/12/ui-again-dont-p.html
also
“Welcome to my fantasy land, which is also sometimes referred to as the 21st century.” We completely subscribe to your point of view!