(Originally posted April 2005 - P.S.) 

Enterprise software products are complex, powerful tools. This complexity is one of the reasons businesses sometimes don’t fully realize a positive return on investment from these products.

For enterprise employees who must use the enterprise application, their complexity poses a considerable challenge. When an application is deployed, users are expected to learn the new system, integrate it into their existing work processes, and become proficient enough to allow the organization to realize the system’s full benefits. Far too often, however, enterprise employees find these new systems hard to learn, hard to master, and difficult to integrate into existing processes.

Enterprise software, which broadly encompasses functions such as enterprise resource planning and management, customer relationship management, supply chain management, project portfolio management, and business intelligence, is a multi-billion per year industry Well-known vendors include BMC, Business Objects, Hyperion,  PeopleSoft, Oracle, SAP, and Siebel, to name a few.

Most Fortune 500 companies have multiple enterprise software products installed and many mid-sized business are either actively considering or have implemented solutions. As the market has matured and vendors have searched for new growth opportunities, even small businesses with fewer than 100 people have options available to them from enterprise software makers.

To the growing company, enterprise software promises to convey benefits in a variety of areas, for example:

• Centralizing customer information from sales, marketing, customer service, and support to improve customer service and enable better prospect identification.
• Identifying and managing enterprise-wide resources needed to receive, process, and account for orders.
• Gathering, storing, analyzing, and providing access to data to enable enterprise users make better business decisions.
• Tracking and organizing information related to project planning, tracking, and resource management for multiple projects, enabling an enterprise-wide view of project scope, resource allocation, risk, cost, and performance.

Complex stuff.

From the CTO’s and IT Director’s perspective, these promises assume that the internal user groups can and will learn the new systems and incorporate them into their work processes. But these outcomes are far from assured. Some of the problems and pitfalls:

• Some businesses find that their employees’ productivity decreases because common or critical processes actually take longer using the new application.
• Others fail to realize an application’s benefits because users “vote with their fingers” and don’t adopt the new system.

Businesses can also experience reduced employee morale and increased turnover related to the imposition of new systems and processes. There will always be employees who resist change in any form. However, if the business mandates process changes and deploys systems that users perceive as difficult to learn, use and remember, the user population will see it as a change for the worse. In this situation morale will decline, and the sufficiently disgruntled will leave.

IT organizations responsible for supporting an enterprise application can find themselves overwhelmed as they struggle under unexpectedly high numbers of support requests that often accompany an application rollout. As anyone who’s worked the help desk knows, rollout day for a complex application often seems like the perfect storm for Level 1 support staff.

Why do these scenarios play out in organization after organization? I argue that two factors are driving these outcomes:

1. Enterprise software developers don’t pay sufficient attention to the specific wants needs of the internal user groups.
2. Enterprises don’t hold their vendors to high enough standards of application learnability, usability, and efficiency.

In my next post, I’ll discuss:

• Some case studies where poor outcomes could have been prevented.
• Why the factors that contribute to these poor outcomes seem to be persistent.
• A model for creating and deploying enterprise software that results in more positive outcomes that these products can deliver.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 9:18 pm and is filed under Desktop Apps, Guru Alert!, Measurement & Assessment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.