computers should be less friendly

In Scoble’s blog Why enterprise software isn’t sexy, he asks a simple question, “Any of you have any ideas on how to make business software sexy?”  A lot of my fellow Enterprise Irregulars have taken Robert to task about this, saying that it is in reality sexy:

“[B]eauty and sexiness is in the eye of the beholder… [seeing] UPS give each one of its drivers a DIAD - and they did it years before the recent wave of personal gadgets - with GPS, wifi, scanning and other technologies. And with a battery that lasts all day. Can our iPhones do that?”

Vinnie does a great job showing how underneath the ugly exterior enterprise software is amazing and sexy.  Most of these posts are all missing the important comparison Scoble is making that Nick Carr picks up on here:

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

The post from Michael Krigsman(which although Nick beats up on chooses not to link to) talks about, how all this isn’t relevant because enterprise software is “intended to “enable core business processes” with a high degree of reliability, security, scalability, and so on.”

Enterprise vendors need to be keenly aware of the consumer market but, SAP’s customers don’t pay them to run around like Scoble and chase every new technology/website that comes out.  They pay them to make measured, smart choices with what they create and how they spend their R&D money.  Their customers do indeed expect the software they create to have a “a high degree of reliability, security, scalability.”

Enterprise vendors have an advantage – they can ride on top of the frothy startup market cherry picking things that work well and will deliver value back to an enterprise’s bottom line.  In the consumer tech industry, the invisible hand of the market is addicted to crack and has the attention span of a two year old.  The consumer market is chaotic, jumpy and prone to fickleness.  Online companies/ideas are created and destroyed everyday, and it is up to Scoble and other followers of tech to survey what’s out there, they need the thousands of readers.  The two industries have totally different business models, Twitter needs millions of users to monetize their software, SAP is very profitable on about 40k “users” world wide.

This shows the Enterprise software market is much more focused and so is their advertising.  Dan Farber does an excellent job of handling this topic and refocusing the discussion on what Gates actually said:

The business computing market, which is way bigger than the consumer computing market, no one pays attention to it. Even in the Wall Street Journal, and you think, oh, this is the paper they’re going to tell me about business computing; no, it’s all about consumer computing

LiveSide.net - Bill Gates, Mix n Mash, and the future of Microsoft

Dan goes on to point out why ZDnet covers enterprise topics:

We recognize that in the 21st century you cannot easily separate the two, given technology is deeply embedded in work and personal lives… [T]he financial equation is not just about page views or number of readers–more important is the quality of readers we draw into the ZDNet orbit

Who am I to contradict Dan when it comes to the determination of advertising revenue — after all he is the Editor in Chief of ZDnet.  In the advertising arena you can also point to things like SAP sponsoring golf stars, tennis pros, formula one cars, etc.  Who watches these things?  CIOs, and other TLA execs who make these decisions.  If SAP cared about CPM they would advertise with NASCAR.  Let’s just give SAP the benefit of the doubt that they understand their market more then Scoble.

I couldn’t agree more that Enterprise vendors need to make things easier to use and an all around friendlier experience but, they need to be smart and measured because that’s what their customers want.

There have been a couple of blogs recently about the waterfall method and it’s usefulness: one from The CIO Weblog, which linked to Eugene Nizker at CIO Magazine which points to an IBM article by Dr. Kruchten on the subject.

For some reason none of these blogs comes right out and says the obvious.  Software development methodologies are like religions:  everyone has one and they all hate everyone else’s for no reason except they aren’t their sworn religion.  In real life, this is dangerous, expensive and prone to the types of failures noted in the blogs.

I haven’t worked in industry for 35+ years like Mr. Nizker but after a few projects it became obvious to me when you can use agile methods and when waterfall is the most appropriate.  Let’s try and do what none of the other blogs tried to do and break it down.

“Roll-out”

A very common thing in large companies (this was found via the CIO Weblog right?) is to take a newly developed solution and push it all over the world to standardize a business process.  These systems are the perfect candidate for the waterfall method.  The users can look at a system and see the gaps and let the people in charge of creating their “copy” of the system know about the changes.  This allows the “developers” to take the requirements in advance and while creating this new “copy” of the system add the modifications required for the new location.  Once the system is ready it can be easily tested with prior business cases and be easily validated for the new location.   I guess this is the “deterministic” task talked about by CIO Magazine.

“I think I need…”

Everything else falls into this category.  The category where the person defining the system has only half of a clue about what they need or want.  I do like the way Mr. Nizker classifies these problems, “[there is a] volatile reality, which changes on them every day [and] the systems we develop influence [that] reality.”  It’s sort of the Heisenberg uncertainly principal of IT systems.  Until we start to peel back the layers the people trying to define the system don’t know the extent of their own delusion.  You should think of it like therapy we must slowly work to the actual root of the problem.  You can only do this in an iterative manner until the user has seen the solution they have no clue what their problem even is.

It is all about using the right tool for the job and being able to tell the different before you start.  Just as using the iterative method is overkill for a roll-out style project, the waterfall spells total doom for the iterative project.  I rarely have a hard time deciding which tool to use.

Not sure what the heck is going on with my feed right now. I switched over to use the Feedsmith plugin on my Wordpress install so I could start to get the most out of Feedburner. However, it seems that now all my delicious links are getting reposted a few times each. I have turned off the Link Splicer from Feedburner, hopefully that will make it stop.

Sorry all.