Productivity is not just about doing things faster; it’s also about not wasting time. So enterprise software vendors are exploiting Web 2.0 technology to improve the usability of their systems, as Lesley Meall, FSN contributing editor reports.
Throughout the brief history of information technology, the most significant developments have almost exclusively started in business and industry, and then filtered down to consumers; but over the past five years this trend has been reversed, during a period of evolutionary change, so rapid, that it might be better termed a revolution – or Web 2.0.
Myriad definitions can make it a challenging concept to get your head around, but the most visible manifestations of Web 2.0 speak for themselves. Blogs, mashups, on-demand software, social networking and wikis, all exemplify the enhanced information sharing, collaboration, interactivity, creativity, and user-created content, that characterise an increasingly democratised World Wide Web, or Internet, or both (depending on how much of a pedant you want to be).
Established players in the business software industry haven’t exactly rushed to embrace Web 2.0: how to make it pay was not immediately obvious, and the perceived lack of security was a major hurdle. Nonetheless, its influence has spread far and wide, changing our expectations of software and systems inside and outside the enterprise, and Web 2.0 trends are now influencing software developers’ approaches to the usability of their products.
“We wanted to exploit the Web 2.0 concepts that have been so successful in a domestic setting, to improve collaboration and performance within the enterprise,” says James Norwood, vice president, worldwide product marketing at the Epicor Software Corporation. At the simplest level, this means allowing RSS feeds on ERP data, to provide real time status on events, without the need for analytics, or utilising
Microsoft Unified Communications Solutions to bring context sensitive Instant Messaging (IM) and presence to ERP.
Improve collaboration and communication
“When you are working, you can see who else is online,” says Norwood, “and if you are viewing an order, for example, you can see everyone who has touched this at any time, communicate with them using VoIP or IM, and capture everything against the order.” Epicor has also used wikis to build a business glossary around enterprise KPIs, which have been tagged, so that they can be searched. “Younger people coming in ask ‘what’s a menu?’” he says, adding: “They expect to be able to work with search; they want to Google.”
At a more elaborate level, Epicor is enabling the composite development of applications – or mashups. “We can bring the world of KPIs and analytics, together with the world of transactional systems to make a new system,” says Norwood. “So you can be looking at a journal entry in finance, and you can have on the same screen two budgets for the last quarter, month, or year, and view it all graphically,” he adds, and bringing all of this together makes people more productive. “It’s the next generation ERP,” he asserts.
Epicor is not alone in its Web 2.0 vision of the future for enterprise applications. “We want to improve the user experience across Agresso and Coda products, ” says Dave Turner, who runs the group marketing operations for Unit 4 Agresso NV, “so we’ve taken a step back and tried to see what software is going to look like in five or ten years time,” – and it will not look much like the current generation of enterprise applications.
“It will be a few years before the Web 2.0 generation are finance controllers and finance directors, but they’re used to Facebook and Twittering, so what do you think is going to happen when they sit down in front of a boring old business application,” asks Turner, then answers his own question: “It just wont be intuitive enough.” So Unit V Agresso NV started a project called X2, with the help of an agency from Silicon Valley.
They’ve been travelling around the world, closely studying the ways that Agresso and Coda ERP users work. “They’ve watched everything from their physical posture to their interaction with computer systems,” he explains, and despite looking at numerous types of user (from accounts clerks and financial controllers, to managers in other parts of the business), the research teams have found “a huge amount of commonality” – particularly when it comes to sources of frustration.
Stop wasting time
“All users want to be able to work more quickly and more easily,” he says, “so we are looking at ways of modifying our systems to enable the user to be at least twice as fast in their work.” This will involve making ERP systems more intuitive. “The system will remember the user,” explains Turner, “and if they use it repeatedly, it will remember what they do”, which is intended to maximise the existing “role-based focus” of the software. “It will be an evolution for our ERP products, but a revolution in the way people work,” he suggests.
Microsoft has also been focusing on the usability of its finance systems. “ERP systems have traditionally presented all users with a uniform interface,” observes Gary Turner, product group director for Dynamics, and this can slow people down, no matter how much additional functionality is built into a product. “When we watched ERP users doing their jobs, we found that they were spending a third of their time looking for things,” he says, “and their productivity was affected by the delays.”
“We studied people in a wide range of roles, and analysed exactly what they needed to do their jobs,” he explains: “We looked at what information they wanted to have at their fingertips, and how they interacted with other products, such as Outlook,” he adds, “so that Microsoft could tailor interfaces for a range of roles to meet their needs, and enable users to customise their home screen to reflect their own personal needs.”
As a result, when Dynamics NAV 2009 was released it introduced a tailored approach to usability, through personalised ‘role centres’ corresponding to 21 key roles (more will follow). They can provide users with an easy-to-navigate window into their work world, with an overview of job-related tasks and information, and the ability to personalise each ‘role centre’ to fit their own unique work styles. This can make existing ERP users more productive, and make the system easier to use for anyone who is familiar with other Microsoft products.
Tell it as it is
Although all of these improvements in usability have all been directly or indirectly influenced by Web 2.0, it is worth noting, that many suppliers are cautiously avoiding any term of reference that would make this too obvious. Even the on-demand provider of budgeting, forecasting, and reporting solutions, Adaptive Planning - itself a Web 2.0 phenomenon - doesn’t want to be seen walking too close to the bleeding edge.
“In Web 2.0 speak, the latest version of Adaptive Planning uses a wiki with discussion groups,” says Bill Soward, CEO, “but we are not saying to CFOs ‘Here’s some cool new technology’, or talking about wikis, because this all sounds too uncontrolled.” Instead it talks about “collaborating in a secure focussed way”, “getting internal teams aligned”, “building in commentary that supports how a plan was made”, and “providing ways to explain the significance of the numbers”, because this is the sort of language the finance community understands
Soward explains: “Web 2.0 awareness is relatively low among people in the finance community,’ so Adaptive Planning is introducing them to it in a step-by-step process. “They want collaboration, but they want it on their terms,” he says, “so we’ve started by showing them how to collaborate in a secure focussed way, and as they become more comfortable with this, we will introduce new Web 2.0 features to them, and they’ll think of it as the obvious next step.”
