by Jevon MacDonald
December 12, 2007 at 12:04 pm
· Filed under Enterprise 2.0
The FastForward conference is focused on The User Revolution as its theme this year, which is perfectly timed for a debate that recently exploded in the enterprise blogging world.
Robert Scoble started things off innocently enough, asking why Enterprise Software isn’t sexier. It sparked a pretty significant reaction from a lot of my fellow Enterprise Irregulars.
The first and probably most abrupt response came from Michael Krigsman on the IT Project Failures blog who bordered on being apologetic for the current state of some enterprise software.
A few themes, or points of view, emerged from the conversations that followed:
- Enterprise Software shouldn’t be user friendly, because it has too much real work to do
- Enterprise Software should continue to act as it does, but should have a nicer layer on top of it
- End Users don’t know what they need
- Large IT lifecycles are so long that User Interfaces are always out of date
Some parallel conversations also got started, with some taking a much longer term look at enterprise software and speculating that it will shift from focusing on the hierarchy of the organization and will instead switch to focusing on giving the power to the individual.
I did chime in with my own thoughts on the issue, what do you think? Does Enterprise Software need to be more social, better looking or easy to use?
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Jevon, I appreciated this blog, as it directly addresses many issues Connectbeam totally believes in. (I am a Connectbeam employee.) First, Enterprise 2.0 applications are NOT Web 2.0 applications. There are many reasons for the rapid advances of the consumer Web 2.0 applications, including the simple fact that Web 2.0 applications grew because users “wanted” to use them. Enterprise 2.0 applications are quite different. Employees go to work at 8:00 am and go home at 5:00 pm. They are not going to be released from their positions because they did not use the Enterprise 2.0 applications put before them. These applications MUST be so user friendly that the user actually “Wants” to use the application because it brings them value in their work environment. The application must “meet” the user wherever they need to go for information.
Also, Enterprise 2.0 means ease of “everything”. Not only must the application be unbelievably user-friendly, but the installation of the application, and the ongoing maintenance and upgrades of that application must also be Enterprise 2.0 easy and friendly to the company installing the application. In example, Connectbeam Appliance for Social Networking, Bookmarking and Tagging can typically be installed behind the firewall into a production-ready state in less than 15 minutes…and this includes Enterprise search and LDAP/AD integration.
With many Fortune 200 customers, Connectbeam is “learning” the requirements for Enterprise 2.0. Our customers are defining the requirements for success, and frankly, meeting these requirements is our measurement of success.
Nice debate!
Can the same argument also move over into the realm of the enterprise website? Surely some of these could be ’sexier’.
Could the root of this be an unwillingness by big enterprises to climb out of their ivory towers and spend time with the user?
As an example, look at the humble spreadsheet. Lotus 1-2-3 held the market for a long time before some young upstart called Microsoft came along with the Windows-based Excel that redefined the way accountants analyzed mundane business data.
How many more areas of our business lives could be revolutionized with more user-centric interfaces?
As an aside, a musician friend recently claimed that most major software paradigm shifts start with music applications. I’m not quite sure how true this is, but having recently taken Ableton Live for a test drive, the one thing that struck me was the lengths that they’d gone through to make a highly complex piece of software more immediately understandable. If you go into the Ableton story, you’ll see a company that was able to enter and dominate a crowded industry by building an interface aimed squarely at the key audience - electronic musicians.
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