Enterprise Technology – Form vs Function

Product Management Priorities for Enterprise Software

On this blog, I continually write about the many issues facing business enterprise software, most notably the curse of user interface complexity, difficult business requirements and the need for heavy customization.

My interest is piqued again by a bunch of new articles and blog posts reiterating and elaborating on the same theme. For example, at ReadWriteWeb, there is currently a poll for readers to express their opinion on enterprise technology’s lack of sexiness versus consumer products. TechCrunch showcased a fawning article about Asana, a new Ex-facebooker powered enterprise collaboration startup that is trying to revolutionize business software by making it really easy, really simple and intuitive to use by allowing people to essentially live in their application. Just a few weeks back, I noted another poll on Software Advice about the Web 2.0 features that business enterprise applications should adopt to improve their user’s experience.

As Marty Cagan a product management expert told me once, consumer product management processes are much sharper than business software product management, because a consumer product has to be sold to every user, buyer and prospect, while a business software can often find its way through the sales process with a single decision maker who might not be the user. This important difference in motivation causes product and development at business software vendors to focus on a very different set of priorities.

However, while I am very passionate about great design and user friendly interface, I believe it might not ever be practical for business software to achieve the same level of “sexiness” as consumer products. Firstly, enterprise software by nature has to reflect the hierarchical nature of enterprises – there are users of all different levels of priority and visibility in the software data model that reflect their level of responsibility in their organization. Often times, unlike a consumer or workgroup centric application that can seek to provide a very streamlined, standardized interface for its homogeneous set of users, business software has to cater to a more diverse, stratified group of users. What is simple and intuitive for some might be complex and hard to use for others.

More importantly though, one has to realize that business and consumers have very different goals when they try to use a software product. The consumer’s task set is typically streamlined, linear and well defined. Unlike that, an enterprise software worth its salt has to satisfy a number of nonlinear workflow, coupled by requirements for administration and reporting functionality to let it track, time and arrange the work of many different employees, all of which are hardly required at the consumer level. This can cause the software to be somewhat bloated. But that is OK, because these elements are needed for the software to provide the required information for its users.

Lastly, I would argue that regardless of how easy software is and how “addicting” it is for users, it is simply a tool to help employees do their work. Without a strong understanding of project management principles that guide a project team’s work, prioritization and planning, a software tool, be it as attractive as Asana or any other, cannot help organize the team and promote efficiency. Any software is after all, a data collection, analysis and task automation tool – it does not alter or improve upon human behavior and the innate ability or willingness to do X or Y. This is perhaps the most important buying criteria for a business software purchaser: do I have a workforce that will make full use of the software and be efficient, independent of whether the software is easy to use or not…