Improving The Enterprise Software Experience

The conversation around enterprise software goes on, with a couple of good responses to my last post that I want to highlight. Firstly, ddoctor (aka Dylan Just who recently started working here at Ephox) in the comments:

I’m thinking of making this one of my career goals – making enterprise software not suck.

Then you’re very much in the right place – that’s what we do…. He goes on to give some very good advice on designing good UIs, but it misses a key point that I was trying to make in my last post:

Enterprise software doesn’t suck because the engineers can’t do better, it sucks because the sales process prioritises things in a way that guarantees that it will.

If you want to fix enterprise software, you have to fix the sales process – you have to get real end users involved in making the purchasing decisions and clearly demonstrate the financial benefits of good UIs in terms of user productivity etc. Our product manager, Damien Fitzpatrick1 makes this case quite well:

For example, lets take a team of 50 knowledge workers getting paid about $30 an hour each. As part of their daily tasks they have to add information to a wiki, to a blog and perhaps to a content management system. To do this our hypothetical knowledge workers will be using my favourite web word processing interface; EditLive!. Conservatively I’m going to assume that we can save each one of these people 10 minutes a day (that’s only about 60 clicks a day). Over the course of the year this means a saving of $62,500 just through a few less clicks.

That’s the kind of argument you need to get into the sales process for enterprise software because it’s simply not on any of the request for tender checklists or feature requirements right now.

Discipline and Punish2 also picked up on my post with an interesting take on things. I particularly agree with:

Bad usability and poor extensibility are thus only symptoms of the underlying disease: a lot of enterprise software is clearly built with centralization as its founding principle. It’s designed to appeal to managers and executives but especially a particular kind of manager who wants top-down, command-and-control abilities over her organization.

It’s true, most enterprise systems focus on the management of data rather than the creation or the actual use of data, however I suspect there’s some confusion between the trends in the consumer space and the trends in the enterprise space:

A natural consequence of this mindset is that Google’s done an excellent job building an open, extensible, and inclusive platform that most enterprise vendors can only describe in their marketing literature. If Google does disrupt enterprise software it won’t be because of its army of PhDs or any kind of “Google Magic.” Rather it will be yet another data point in the long, long history of “big”, open technologies disrupting “small”, closed technologies.

The catch here is that the trend towards open technologies with a horde of small vendors developing plugins, widgets or whatever they happen to be called, is very much a consumer trend. There’s no such trend in the enterprise world, in fact it’s quite the opposite – enterprises are more and more inclined to consolidate on one big vendor that supplies the entire stack. This trend is picked up on in all the major reports I’ve read (Gartner, CMSWatch etc) and is showing through in the number of deals we’re seeing with multiple CMSs being replaced by a single instance from one vendor. It’s also showing through in the success big vendors are starting to have in the new collaboration and social software market which until very recently has only been filled by small players. Expect those small players to either grow up fast, or be run down by the big players. It’s very difficult to do well in the enterprise market if you’re a small company and impossible if you’re a small company without good partnerships and relationships with the big players.

Enterprise software will become more usable over time, but it won’t be because of the threat of Google or openness running it down – it will be because enterprises start to realize the true productivity cost and you’ll start seeing the argument Damien put forward more and more in enterprise sales. Better quality software directly helps your bottom line. That’s where the changes need to drive from if they’re going to succeed – not the desire for developers to make the world a better place.

It may be sad, but money makes the world go round.

 

1 – who seriously needs to blog more often….↩

2 – I couldn't find an actual person's name anywhere on the site….↩