notes and views on crm, social media, and the human side of information technology

The Coolness Factor

Firing up your office laptop, logging into SAP and screaming WOW: no, this doesn’t happen. Enterprise software is boring, and quite frankly I cannot understand where does the whole bunch of Enterprise Irregulars find the temerity to tell Scoble he was wrong to wonder, Why enterprise software isn’t sexy , and say he doesn’t get it. There is nothing to get, folks: enterprise software is boring, boring, boring, 99 percent of the time, and no, it doesn’t have to be; methinks Workday looks pretty cool (judging from the demos), and so does Salesforce.

And you know what? It’s not a coincidence I’ve picked up these two. SaaS is a disruptor in many ways, and one of them is getting rid of the internal IT and all its silly policies, long implementation times, and the inevitable hordes of consultants. It has to appeal to users.

But I digress. Enterprise Software is so horribly soulless and user-unfriendly due to a number of reasons:

  1. Purchasing decisions are made by paper-pushers. End users are usually not involved as they are “represented” by a somebody who hasn’t been at the frontline for a long time, won’t be using the software, and therefore doesn’t really know what it should do and how.
  2. Internal IT - too much work, too little appreciation = not much motivation. Group them with a “team” of hastily assembled junior Superheroes from Accenture, and boy, you’ve got no time for sexy; you are happy if the code compiles and does just barely enough so that you can move on to the next release.
  3. There is never enough time and money do to things right. Enterprises have a huge number of priorities they need to juggle, and making their employees happy isn’t nearly as important as making them productive (as if these two weren’t interconnected), and by productive the suits usually mean an insane screen with lots of grids and forms generated from database tables (100+ attributes to handle), so that the poor schmuck doesn’t have to navigate anywhere, he’s got everything “at his fingertips”, and he does and they bleed at the end of the day, but who cares.

Here I stumbled onto the answer: the Enterprise doesn’t usually look at its employees with the same CRM-fueled passion as it does at its customers. They are, after all, a column in the Expenses section. So why bother? They cannot switch to a competitor’s application should they dislike what they’ve been served. Damn, they can seldom change their desktop background; the cubicle slavery doesn’t allow for neither software choice nor simple self-expression.

I believe this is changing; SaaS is playing a huge role in it, and so are all the gadgets we buy that free our mind and scratch many itches. As we move from the purely utilitarian to the beautiful (compare the first CD players with PS3), the workplace is going to change, too, and so is enterprise software. In its own clumsy, passive-aggresive, uninspiring way.

PS For a sober look at the subject, read Jason Fried’s post on Why Enterprise Software Sucks.

PS II: I concur with Nicholas Carr:

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.

Additional reading

December 10, 2007 | Filed Under CRM, Rants, Software delivery 

comments

Leave a Reply