Robert Scoble (still) doesn't understand enterprise software
Summary: Yet again, we open the thorny debate of enterprise vs. consumer software.
Several years ago, famous blogger, Robert Scoble, made outlandish statements about enterprise software that started a heated discussion and culminated in author, Nick Carr, declaring the debate a "FIRESTORM!"
Also read: "Enterprise software won't get you laid" Sexy enterprise software, part two: SAP and Workday Robert Scoble doesn't understand enterprise software Five principles of sexy enterprise software
As before, Robert goes berserk on this topic, comparing a deep enterprise application (Workday) to a lightweight consumer tool (Expensify). After expressing shock and outrage that the little Expensify app better meets his expense reporting needs than industrial strength Workday, Robert exclaims:
This is how sucky enterprise software gets chosen. The people who choose it are choosing the software that makes THEIR lives easier, NOT the lives of everyone else in the enterprise.
Four years have passed since those fateful days of FIRESTORM, but apparently, little has changed. Despite the increasing convergence of IT and consumer technology, even smart folks like Robert Scoble still misunderstand enterprise software.
If you are brave enough to handle it, here's a video in which Robert conflates enterprise and consumer software:
Enterprise vendors like Workday, SAP, Oracle, and NetSuite build solutions that serve a broad range of business processes and functional areas inside large organizations. To be useful in an enterprise environment, the software must integrate deeply (and hopefully seamlessly, but that's another issue) with many existing systems. Enterprise technology must also scale, offer robust security, high reliability, and so on. In contrast, consumer tools typically perform little more than a single function based on a very small set of features.
Enterprise solutions and consumer tools are not the same. Robert's discussion of Workday and Expensify, well intentioned though it may be, compares a broad enterprise system with a small utility program. When Scoble extrapolates assumptions about enterprise software based on a tiny subset of features in Workday, he commits a logical fallacy and falls prey to an attractive, but wrong, "sin of convenience."
In fairness, however, Robert raises an excellent point. Ideally, the user experience of enterprise software should be best in class on par with consumer apps. Because enterprise technology must retain deep, backend integration along with business process richness, accomplishing this goal is hard. Few vendors are up to the challenge, which is one reason enterprise software is so often difficult to use.
Scoble's complaints are also ironic because Workday offers the best overall user experience among the major enterprise vendors; the company's iPad app is also excellent.
That said, we all know that entering expenses is a pain in the ass and little Expensify does it really well - Workday should indeed look and learn.
Advice to all enterprise software vendors: Redouble efforts to offer best-in-class user experience while retaining the enterprise substance that makes you indispensable to virtually every major organization on the planet.
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RE: Robert Scoble (still) doesn't understand enterprise software
RE: Robert Scoble (still) doesn't understand enterprise software
RE: Robert Scoble (still) doesn't understand enterprise software
RE: Robert Scoble (still) doesn't understand enterprise software
"..care too much about the IT department"!?!?!?!
RE: Robert Scoble (still) doesn't understand enterprise software
The real way Enterprise Software is purchased
PS: Epilog to the story. End users hate the system because it is a "force fit" to the organization. We had to whittle off the organization's corners to make it fit in that round hole. But do users hate the VP who bought the magic beans? No, of course not. They hate their IT department.
RE: Robert Scoble (still) doesn't understand enterprise software
RE: Robert Scoble (still) doesn't understand enterprise software
RE: Robert Scoble (still) doesn't understand enterprise software
RE: Robert Scoble (still) doesn't understand enterprise software
The user experience of most "enterprise applications" is utterly abysmal. Anyone who has been on the end-user side of an Oracle, SAP, Dynamix, or other "enterprise systems" implementation basically suffers through the entire user lifecycle with bad design, compromised implementation, and tremendous user-facing complexity that should have never been shipped in the first place.
How did all that complexity get there? IT departments were saddled with a "do everything" product that was poorly implemented and doesn't actually deliver much of the "flexible, easy-to-integrate" capabilities that sales promised, and executive suits bought.
In the end, the buyer (exec, procurement) is duped, the user suffers every day they have to use the app, and the implementor (IT) is screwed from day one to EOL.
Thus goes the Enterprise software lifecycle.
Now, trying to organize a collection of consumer-built apps in to a coherent enterprise financial system capable of passing SOX compliance?
Honestly, I'm not sure which is harder/easier, or better/worse.
User experience has more to do with implementation than design.
1) Users in the business that "loved" the software also tended to have a better overall understanding of their entire business (rather than just their own cubicle). Users that hated the software tended to only understand or even really care about their own position in the company. Given Robert's rant on his expense software task, he probably falls into the latter category of these users.
2) The businesses where users "hated" the system tended to be those where the system was implemented incorrectly or incompletely in some way. In many cases, users would complain that the system "wouldn't do what they needed", but when looking a bit further, it actually turned out that the system COULD do what they needed, but it wasn't SET UP to do what they needed.
3) Users that "loved" the system tended to get a lot more training on it either when it was implemented or when they were first hired than users that "hated" the system.
While not always the case, in many and maybe even most cases, the user-friendliness of enterprise software isn't actually dependent on the design of the software itself - it's dependent on the implementation of it. Now software selection is part of "implementation", but the selection has to follow the design, not the other way around (another major flaw in some implementations).
And yes, THIS is why IT gets blamed - and rightly so!
RE: Robert Scoble (still) doesn't understand enterprise software
Blaming IT, who usually performs only part of the deployment phase is a cop out. IT is rarely consulted adequately (key word here) during the product selection process.
Usability (or "user friendliness") is a part of the Design phase, not the Implementation or Deployment phases. Most accounts of the Software Development Cycle explain this.
End user training and support occurs during Deployment. Most successful software developers incorporate these expenses into the cost of the application. Trying to compensate for design flaws through training and support won't fly in most cases. That's putting lipstick on a pig.
We can agree there are many forces at play here..
<i>Blaming IT, who usually performs only part of the deployment phase is a cop out. IT is rarely consulted adequately (key word here) during the product selection process.</i>
I do agree putting all the blame on IT isn't exactly fair in the context that cornpie has provided. Having said that, it's just as much a cop-out to blame an IT failure and poor user experience on a slick salesman and a witless executive.
Based on your own response, however, I still think IT should shoulder some of the blame here. If you're not being consulted adequately, then there is at least a perception problem with your IT department, and there's probably a REAL problem with your IT department. The first things you should ask yourself are:
Why doesn't IT have enough authority to stop projects that they "know" are a poor fit to the company? Does IT really know the company enough to make that call? Does the executive team have enough faith in IT to listen to objections that are raised? To what extent *should* IT be involved in software selection?
In a lot of cases, the real answer is either the IT department really *WAS* consulted on a project as adequately as possible, but didn't step up to the plate, ask enough questions, and deliver the required dose of reality needed to put the project on a successful path, or the IT department is one where everyone thinks of technology before business requirements, in which case they have a real problem seeing a project from an overall business perspective and aren't really able to provide a useful contribution to the process until it's time to fiddle with the technology (at which time, it's already too late to put the brakes on).
<i>Usability (or "user friendliness") is a part of the Design phase, not the Implementation or Deployment phases. Most accounts of the Software Development Cycle explain this.</i>
As a lot more software is being purchased "off-the-shelf" rather than being custom-designed, user experience really has to be included as part of the selection phase of the implementation.
Now in some ways, that allows those in charge of selecting the software more visibility in the real give-and-take of the software selection process, but as others have pointed out here, sometimes an annoying UI feature will be accepted because that negative is offset by the ability to, say, record costs against projects in the company's ERP, update a company dashboard immediately, and allow executives to identify business exceptions and make important decisions sooner.
Usually, "bad" UI is really caused by a conflicting set of business requirements, each trying to be satisfied by a part of the system where, if one were turfed, the UI would be much simpler.
Never been the IT guy that's getting blamed, eh?
IT is just making the best out of the steaming pile of crap its been handed and trying its best to make things work in spite of all the bad decisions that took place before they were even involved. And when it comes right down to it, its the executives that hire and fire and pay our salaries and so if we have to make a choice between them and end users, guess what happens. We do like to eat you know. End users can hate us and yell at us and treat us like crap - but they usually can't fire us.
So its right to blame IT? Well I can't say never. But it's not the norm.
Nope - I'm probably the guy you hate the most...
In your words, I'm the guy serving up the steaming pile of crap, along with the overall goals of the implementation and the expectations of the organization overall.
Really, I'm the guy that helps select the software with the overall ideas of what the software is intended to do. I'm also the guy making the decision of what is more important than what in the overall scheme of things.
Unfortunately for IT, I'm also the guy that's going to demand that any concerns that are brought up with the implementation of the software be communicated in the context of the overall scope and goals of the project, not just some complaint by a few vocal users who are used to a different UI, a different process, or "The Old Way" of doing things. If IT cannot draw a distinct connection between a perceived flaw in the software and a specified goal in the project plan, your objection is going to be thrown on the "nice-to-have" pile.
And you know how often the "need-to-have" pile becomes small enough that the "nice-to-have" pile even gets looked at.
RE: Robert Scoble (still) doesn't understand enterprise software
RE: Robert Scoble (still) doesn't understand enterprise software
The popular piece of "enterprise" software will usually have at most a few ten thousand users, for a VERY large org, and more likely just a few hundred, at any given installation. A popular "consumer grade" tool is still a mere toy at few hundred users, and can often go to hundreds of thousands to millions. Bluntly, enterprise software scales poorly, and in ways that make a LOT of money for Oracle, Microsoft, and Dell. And their vaunted "security" is poor at best. They are riddled with exposed databases, Bobby Tables weaknesses, scripting attacks, and require obsolete server and client versions.
By the metrics you say that enterprise software is better, it is usually actually far far worse.
The Middle Ground