12 ms·

Why Enterprise Software Sucks: 6 Years Later

42 points by turoczy 13y ago

steven777400 13y ago
Also, it's complicated. If I'm running a startup, and I have 100 customers using my product who each have a wishlist, I can prioritize which of those wish items fit best with my product and business vision, without excessive implementation cost or technical debt, and proceed on that path. On the other hand, in the enterprise, non-technical managers make business requirements that are largely non-negotiable. Product complexity spirals out of control as everyone wants their "pet feature" included, even if it conflicts with other features, leading to massively customizable (and thus even more complicated, to implement that customizability) solutions.
- lmkg 13y ago
  I don't think you can point at management as the source of the problems. I think the real source is the nature of enterprise itself: a small number of large customers. When each individual customer provides enough revenue to subsidize the development of their own pet feature requests, it's a plausible business decision to accommodate, or at least entertain, those requests. Blaming that on management seems to me to be shooting the messenger. And the vendors that don't accommodate feature requests, lose business to the vendors that do. Survival of the fittest is a cruel master.
  - mey 13y ago
    I agree with this, I am currently working in an Enterprise focused company and I generally look at our job as being custom integration. Not because that is the best way to develop software, but the best way to engage with these large clients. It's how they want to be engaged. In turn you charge them appropriately, help guide them away from the obvious traps, and have a fundamental knowledge about what your domain expertise is. The last one is important to know what to say yes/no too. It can be very profitable, but frustrating from an engineering point of view due to the unnecessary complexity created when multiple "vendors" are developing software to glue the client enterprise together. Lots and lots of glue.
rjempson 13y ago
Nothing like broad sweeping generalizations to make a good story. I have a few points to make : 1. End users have an incredible ability to complain that software doesn't meet their very specific and peculiar requirements at any point in time. "Why can't I print this expense report landscape on a5 paper, we have run out of normal paper" - "Why doesn't this expense report sub-total by supplier and week, but only in leap years?" 2. If the people using the software were the business owners I think they would sing a different tune, or go out of business because they spend so much money optimizing for user experience. 3. Enterprise software tends to be infinitely more complex than most Saas projects. It is hard to budget and focus on the user experience when you are processing billions of dollars in transactions, with complex business rules, complex tax rules, complex laws, integrating with legacy systems, changing business conditions and strategy. Most businesses will put compliance and accuracy ahead of user experience. 4. Non-enterprise developers seem to think they are shit-hot and have a chip on their shoulders about enterprise developers for some reason. So you get an endless stream of articles along these lines.
- vacri 13y ago
  I'd add that I have seen some endusers complain because we implemented features they were asking for. Not because those features were done poorly, but because the change requires a slight change to the user's workflow (software is many things, but it's not psychic). I also remembered a new hardware product going out to a satellite office in $other_country, where the favourite sport of the sales staff was coming up with excuses for not meeting targets. This next-gen bit of hardware had everything they'd asked for and used as an excuse for not meeting those targets, and it was a nice bit of kit that would sell well (I'd previously worked in the industry it was targeted at and wished I'd had it then). Supplied with the first production model, they were asked for comments. The sole comment that was returned was "well, at least it's not green". That company also gave me an insight to your #3. We had SAP-like software but the company treated us like shit so we were looking to replace them. It turns out there are (were as of 2009) no cheap options - they all failed at nested bills-of-material. A product might be a full box with manual and other parts. That product holds the assembled product and a couple of other assemblies. That assembled product holds several boards and subassemblies. Those subassemblies then require other parts. Rinse, repeat over several products and you have a system where there's nothing useful on offer at the cheap end of the spectrum (without heavy/clunky modification). Most of the cheap stuff was entertaining a retail mindset - "item A comes from supplier B/why would you need to ever put A and B in a kit?". Even the vaunted Salesforce needed customising to handle the idea of kits - and that is only a single level of nested BOMs.
dkrich 13y ago
I think that a lot has to do with the writers and readers of those articles having inherent biases that cause them to associate small and pretty with good solutions. I happen to fall into that camp and much prefer nicely designed Saas products to legacy bloatware but I have been astonished to see time and time again that other people I work with are not of like mind. I once tried to convert my team to Asana because I love it for personal projects and I naturally expected them to compare it to our current methods and be blown away. I was surprised when it got nothing more than a "meh" reaction and within days it was forgotten. The team actually preferred SharePoint. This also by the way is a case in point of why it is important to talk to customers before building. Your assumptions about what is best are not necessarily accurate. Small software sells well to small businesses and in a lot of cases small teams, but company-wide (which I think is what we're talking about here) takes a whole different level of sales and influence.
- jrochkind1 13y ago
  I wonder if they actually preferred Sharepoint-- or if they just didn't care at all, and not caring preferred to stick with what they already knew how to ~workaround~ use, rather than learn something new.
Zigurd 13y ago
Before mobile apps can really become a model for enterprise software, their level of sophistication is going to have to go up: Plug-ins, sync rather than CRUD-over-IP, better use of Android modularity tools including ContentProvider components, bound services, more intent filters, etc. Right aspiration, but not enough great examples yet.
bcoates 13y ago
This article claims that eventually, the companies will come around: that "Companies are entrenched in their systems and don’t dare touch it if it’s “working”" but eventually they'll come around. Has anyone done any research on the opposite possibility: that most companies simply ossify around the "acceptable" enterprise software when they're newer, and don't so much adapt as die off, leaving room for more recently founded companies that aren't attached to some ancient system? The difference is of critical importance to someone trying to sell into that market, it's the difference between being Mercedes and Unilever.
- Spooky23 13y ago
  Does your software at your users site potentially contain taxpayer data from the IRS or state tax authority? Congratulations, the implementation needs to comply with IRS Pub 1075. Does it potentially contain law enforcement data? Congratulations, your customer needs to implement it in a manner consistent withs its CJIS agreement. Healthcare data? Hello HIPPA. Up to a certain size, businesses can pretty much do whatever they want. Then they reach a point or acquire a customer that requires them to start meeting various regulatory requirements. Ability to comply is a business opportunity. If I make software that contains encryption that isn't FIPS 140-2 validated, I am missing out on a multi-billion dollar market. (US and state governments + govt contractors)
greedo 13y ago
Good enough is the enemy of perfect. One of my duties is managing my company's backup systems. We use NetBackup, and despite it having a pretty old codebase underneath, it works fairly well. However, its interface is right out of 1998. Usability features you would expect in a modern program are just missing. Where it shines is in its ability to script/automate a lot of tasks. Users who only use the GUI are surprised to see that their list of annoyances aren't really valid; NetBackup just doesn't put as much emphasis on shiny.
- josephkern 13y ago
  Perfect is the enemy of productive.
AndyNemmity 13y ago
I work in Enterprise Software. What you said has relevance in some companies, and is completely different in others. Really hard to make broad generalizations like that. Mobile Apps are now a huge part of Enterprise Software. Adoption rates are high in the younger people, and lower as the age climbs. The average age of the people in the vertical (Retail vs. Oil and Gas) have much more to do with the adoption rates than Enterprise Software vs. startups. There's a lot more I could speak to, but I don't agree with so much of your premise that it's hard to figure out where to focus. Even the questions aren't clear. Should we focus on ERP/CRM systems as the basis of the question, or across the whole enterprise? They are very different questions with different answers, and adoption rates.
jwilliams 13y ago
The reason Enterprise Software sucks is customization. Customization makes it expensive, harder to test and impossible to upgrade. However - Customization is what every Enterprise asks for. Sometimes they need it, sometimes they don't. Customers and vendors are notoriously bad at picking the difference. SaaS offerings tends to be militantly "vanilla" with no customization. Customization kills the margin for SaaS vendors. Whatever you think of Salesforce in terms of their tech and approach -- this is the area where they excel. You can blame the "Enterprise" as much as you like, but these are structural issues.
- kyzyl 13y ago
  This. I dislike clunky enterprise software as much as the next guy, but really sometimes customization is what you need, and the hip new basecamp-esque players more often than not aren't willing. Salesforce is a great example. My startup (may she RIP) had very intricate sales channels, and we picked salesforce for our CRM because we could customize it how ever we wanted. This was also before the big "SaaS boom", so there were far fewer players in that space. Back then, salesforce was clunky, slow and expensive as hell (I don't know what it's like now), but we could manage our workflow end-to-end, all the way from trade show sales to automagically managing ads and landing page rings. I'm not sure anymore, but I would bet that's something that's still hard to come by.
ams6110 13y ago
Enterprise software does not put a huge priority on attractive graphics and "discoverable" functionality, because people who use it very often tend to perform the same transactions over and over and over. Efficiency in this use case is far more important than e.g. something like HipMunk where someone who's never seen it before should be able to figure it out without any help. I was recently at my insurance agent's office updating my automobile insurance coverage. The agent worked on a mainframe character mode interface and could absolutely BLAZE through the various options and quote different insurance options instantly. No dragging and dropping, no pointing and clicking -- her hands never left the keyboard. Looking at the screen, nothing really looked very pretty or intuitive. The system clearly would require some training or at least some instructions to learn how to use it. But it works really well once you invest that learning. Then there are people in the enterprise who have to use this software occasionally... e.g. people who have to file an occasional expense report, or update their tax withholding. For those people it sucks, because there isn't a lot of hand-holding, and the software feels clunky and arcane.
- cmadan 13y ago
  The Bloomberg Terminal is a great example. There is nothing intuitive about is at all and using the mouse with it is quite painful. (Here's what a news screen in the terminal looks like http://www.businessinsider.com/type-this-command-into-your-bloomberg-terminal-and-youll-basically-get-theflyonthewallcom-2010-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/type-this-command-into-your-b...) However, every new feature we had to release needed to have every action accessible using the keyboard. There were best practices for using certain keys with certain actions (so that they were consistent across the features) and this was one of the most important things of an UI review. I ended up using the keyboard always whenever interacting with the terminal. The Chief UI guy at Bloomberg was ex-Wall Street and told us that when he started working on his first job on Wall Street, someone came up to his PC and disconnected his mouse so that he would learn how to use the Terminal properly and efficiently.
  - xorgar831 13y ago
    Intuitiveness aside, the other major issue with enterprise software is the efficiency of use, and how out of touch it is with the task at hand. They slow you down considerably IMO. e.g. having to tell the app things it could just figure out, sloppy focus that requires you to fuss with the UI, having to input a lot of text in small text box that won't resize or spell check it, having to manually click a button to auto-complete, modal dialog boxes that block you from reading important info in another pane, uselessly vague or incorrect error messages for easily correctable problems cause you to waste hours guessing what the real problem is, returns no error message at all, oh you're using the wrong browser, oh to attach a file in your enterprise webmail you need to install Sliverlight, oh the web based wiki plugin for your enterprise document system only works on Windows with IE, oh mobile browsers are not supported, let me slowly redraw the screen a few more times due to some .Net + Areo legacy issue and hang your window manager, supports Kerberos SSO but requires to you enter a password, doesn't let you enter a username or password since it uses Kerberos SSO... etc.
holri 13y ago
Enterprise Software is hard because the modeled enterprises are complex and very different to each other. This is a completely different beast than your toy App on your phone.

42 points by turoczy 13y ago

Also, it's complicated. If I'm running a startup, and I have 100 customers using my product who each have a wishlist, I can prioritize which of those wish items fit best with my product and business vision, without excessive implementation cost or technical debt, and proceed on that path. On the other hand, in the enterprise, non-technical managers make business requirements that are largely non-negotiable. Product complexity spirals out of control as everyone wants their "pet feature" included, even if it conflicts with other features, leading to massively customizable (and thus even more complicated, to implement that customizability) solutions.

lmkg 13y ago
I don't think you can point at management as the source of the problems. I think the real source is the nature of enterprise itself: a small number of large customers. When each individual customer provides enough revenue to subsidize the development of their own pet feature requests, it's a plausible business decision to accommodate, or at least entertain, those requests. Blaming that on management seems to me to be shooting the messenger. And the vendors that don't accommodate feature requests, lose business to the vendors that do. Survival of the fittest is a cruel master.
- mey 13y ago
  I agree with this, I am currently working in an Enterprise focused company and I generally look at our job as being custom integration. Not because that is the best way to develop software, but the best way to engage with these large clients. It's how they want to be engaged. In turn you charge them appropriately, help guide them away from the obvious traps, and have a fundamental knowledge about what your domain expertise is. The last one is important to know what to say yes/no too. It can be very profitable, but frustrating from an engineering point of view due to the unnecessary complexity created when multiple "vendors" are developing software to glue the client enterprise together. Lots and lots of glue.

rjempson 13y ago

Nothing like broad sweeping generalizations to make a good story. I have a few points to make : 1. End users have an incredible ability to complain that software doesn't meet their very specific and peculiar requirements at any point in time. "Why can't I print this expense report landscape on a5 paper, we have run out of normal paper" - "Why doesn't this expense report sub-total by supplier and week, but only in leap years?" 2. If the people using the software were the business owners I think they would sing a different tune, or go out of business because they spend so much money optimizing for user experience. 3. Enterprise software tends to be infinitely more complex than most Saas projects. It is hard to budget and focus on the user experience when you are processing billions of dollars in transactions, with complex business rules, complex tax rules, complex laws, integrating with legacy systems, changing business conditions and strategy. Most businesses will put compliance and accuracy ahead of user experience. 4. Non-enterprise developers seem to think they are shit-hot and have a chip on their shoulders about enterprise developers for some reason. So you get an endless stream of articles along these lines.

vacri 13y ago
I'd add that I have seen some endusers complain because we implemented features they were asking for. Not because those features were done poorly, but because the change requires a slight change to the user's workflow (software is many things, but it's not psychic). I also remembered a new hardware product going out to a satellite office in $other_country, where the favourite sport of the sales staff was coming up with excuses for not meeting targets. This next-gen bit of hardware had everything they'd asked for and used as an excuse for not meeting those targets, and it was a nice bit of kit that would sell well (I'd previously worked in the industry it was targeted at and wished I'd had it then). Supplied with the first production model, they were asked for comments. The sole comment that was returned was "well, at least it's not green". That company also gave me an insight to your #3. We had SAP-like software but the company treated us like shit so we were looking to replace them. It turns out there are (were as of 2009) no cheap options - they all failed at nested bills-of-material. A product might be a full box with manual and other parts. That product holds the assembled product and a couple of other assemblies. That assembled product holds several boards and subassemblies. Those subassemblies then require other parts. Rinse, repeat over several products and you have a system where there's nothing useful on offer at the cheap end of the spectrum (without heavy/clunky modification). Most of the cheap stuff was entertaining a retail mindset - "item A comes from supplier B/why would you need to ever put A and B in a kit?". Even the vaunted Salesforce needed customising to handle the idea of kits - and that is only a single level of nested BOMs.

dkrich 13y ago

I think that a lot has to do with the writers and readers of those articles having inherent biases that cause them to associate small and pretty with good solutions. I happen to fall into that camp and much prefer nicely designed Saas products to legacy bloatware but I have been astonished to see time and time again that other people I work with are not of like mind. I once tried to convert my team to Asana because I love it for personal projects and I naturally expected them to compare it to our current methods and be blown away. I was surprised when it got nothing more than a "meh" reaction and within days it was forgotten. The team actually preferred SharePoint. This also by the way is a case in point of why it is important to talk to customers before building. Your assumptions about what is best are not necessarily accurate. Small software sells well to small businesses and in a lot of cases small teams, but company-wide (which I think is what we're talking about here) takes a whole different level of sales and influence.

jrochkind1 13y ago
I wonder if they actually preferred Sharepoint-- or if they just didn't care at all, and not caring preferred to stick with what they already knew how to ~workaround~ use, rather than learn something new.

Zigurd 13y ago

Before mobile apps can really become a model for enterprise software, their level of sophistication is going to have to go up: Plug-ins, sync rather than CRUD-over-IP, better use of Android modularity tools including ContentProvider components, bound services, more intent filters, etc. Right aspiration, but not enough great examples yet.

bcoates 13y ago

This article claims that eventually, the companies will come around: that "Companies are entrenched in their systems and don’t dare touch it if it’s “working”" but eventually they'll come around. Has anyone done any research on the opposite possibility: that most companies simply ossify around the "acceptable" enterprise software when they're newer, and don't so much adapt as die off, leaving room for more recently founded companies that aren't attached to some ancient system? The difference is of critical importance to someone trying to sell into that market, it's the difference between being Mercedes and Unilever.

Spooky23 13y ago
Does your software at your users site potentially contain taxpayer data from the IRS or state tax authority? Congratulations, the implementation needs to comply with IRS Pub 1075. Does it potentially contain law enforcement data? Congratulations, your customer needs to implement it in a manner consistent withs its CJIS agreement. Healthcare data? Hello HIPPA. Up to a certain size, businesses can pretty much do whatever they want. Then they reach a point or acquire a customer that requires them to start meeting various regulatory requirements. Ability to comply is a business opportunity. If I make software that contains encryption that isn't FIPS 140-2 validated, I am missing out on a multi-billion dollar market. (US and state governments + govt contractors)

greedo 13y ago

Good enough is the enemy of perfect. One of my duties is managing my company's backup systems. We use NetBackup, and despite it having a pretty old codebase underneath, it works fairly well. However, its interface is right out of 1998. Usability features you would expect in a modern program are just missing. Where it shines is in its ability to script/automate a lot of tasks. Users who only use the GUI are surprised to see that their list of annoyances aren't really valid; NetBackup just doesn't put as much emphasis on shiny.

josephkern 13y ago
Perfect is the enemy of productive.

AndyNemmity 13y ago

I work in Enterprise Software. What you said has relevance in some companies, and is completely different in others. Really hard to make broad generalizations like that. Mobile Apps are now a huge part of Enterprise Software. Adoption rates are high in the younger people, and lower as the age climbs. The average age of the people in the vertical (Retail vs. Oil and Gas) have much more to do with the adoption rates than Enterprise Software vs. startups. There's a lot more I could speak to, but I don't agree with so much of your premise that it's hard to figure out where to focus. Even the questions aren't clear. Should we focus on ERP/CRM systems as the basis of the question, or across the whole enterprise? They are very different questions with different answers, and adoption rates.

jwilliams 13y ago

The reason Enterprise Software sucks is customization. Customization makes it expensive, harder to test and impossible to upgrade. However - Customization is what every Enterprise asks for. Sometimes they need it, sometimes they don't. Customers and vendors are notoriously bad at picking the difference. SaaS offerings tends to be militantly "vanilla" with no customization. Customization kills the margin for SaaS vendors. Whatever you think of Salesforce in terms of their tech and approach -- this is the area where they excel. You can blame the "Enterprise" as much as you like, but these are structural issues.

kyzyl 13y ago
This. I dislike clunky enterprise software as much as the next guy, but really sometimes customization is what you need, and the hip new basecamp-esque players more often than not aren't willing. Salesforce is a great example. My startup (may she RIP) had very intricate sales channels, and we picked salesforce for our CRM because we could customize it how ever we wanted. This was also before the big "SaaS boom", so there were far fewer players in that space. Back then, salesforce was clunky, slow and expensive as hell (I don't know what it's like now), but we could manage our workflow end-to-end, all the way from trade show sales to automagically managing ads and landing page rings. I'm not sure anymore, but I would bet that's something that's still hard to come by.

ams6110 13y ago

Enterprise software does not put a huge priority on attractive graphics and "discoverable" functionality, because people who use it very often tend to perform the same transactions over and over and over. Efficiency in this use case is far more important than e.g. something like HipMunk where someone who's never seen it before should be able to figure it out without any help. I was recently at my insurance agent's office updating my automobile insurance coverage. The agent worked on a mainframe character mode interface and could absolutely BLAZE through the various options and quote different insurance options instantly. No dragging and dropping, no pointing and clicking -- her hands never left the keyboard. Looking at the screen, nothing really looked very pretty or intuitive. The system clearly would require some training or at least some instructions to learn how to use it. But it works really well once you invest that learning. Then there are people in the enterprise who have to use this software occasionally... e.g. people who have to file an occasional expense report, or update their tax withholding. For those people it sucks, because there isn't a lot of hand-holding, and the software feels clunky and arcane.

cmadan 13y ago
The Bloomberg Terminal is a great example. There is nothing intuitive about is at all and using the mouse with it is quite painful. (Here's what a news screen in the terminal looks like http://www.businessinsider.com/type-this-command-into-your-bloomberg-terminal-and-youll-basically-get-theflyonthewallcom-2010-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/type-this-command-into-your-b...) However, every new feature we had to release needed to have every action accessible using the keyboard. There were best practices for using certain keys with certain actions (so that they were consistent across the features) and this was one of the most important things of an UI review. I ended up using the keyboard always whenever interacting with the terminal. The Chief UI guy at Bloomberg was ex-Wall Street and told us that when he started working on his first job on Wall Street, someone came up to his PC and disconnected his mouse so that he would learn how to use the Terminal properly and efficiently.
- xorgar831 13y ago
  Intuitiveness aside, the other major issue with enterprise software is the efficiency of use, and how out of touch it is with the task at hand. They slow you down considerably IMO. e.g. having to tell the app things it could just figure out, sloppy focus that requires you to fuss with the UI, having to input a lot of text in small text box that won't resize or spell check it, having to manually click a button to auto-complete, modal dialog boxes that block you from reading important info in another pane, uselessly vague or incorrect error messages for easily correctable problems cause you to waste hours guessing what the real problem is, returns no error message at all, oh you're using the wrong browser, oh to attach a file in your enterprise webmail you need to install Sliverlight, oh the web based wiki plugin for your enterprise document system only works on Windows with IE, oh mobile browsers are not supported, let me slowly redraw the screen a few more times due to some .Net + Areo legacy issue and hang your window manager, supports Kerberos SSO but requires to you enter a password, doesn't let you enter a username or password since it uses Kerberos SSO... etc.

holri 13y ago

Enterprise Software is hard because the modeled enterprises are complex and very different to each other. This is a completely different beast than your toy App on your phone.