Over the past few years there has been a paradigm shift in the world of information and communications technology. Rather than trends and tools filtering down from professional to personal use, the opposite happens with increasing frequency. Yet despite this, most business software – and it is safe to generalise here – remains significantly more difficult to use than social networking tools or computer games. So FSN writer Lesley Meall looks at what business software developers are doing to update their systems.
SAP is going through a ‘transformational phase’ during which is trying to make its products ‘simple, viral and user-friendly’, in an attempt to woo the next generation of business software users. According to one of SAP’s two CEOs Jim Hagemann Snabe, the company that is credited with inventing the enterprise resource planning system (even before there was a name for it) has been studying the recent successes of Apple and Electronic Arts (EA), and is trying to learn from them, by making SAP systems more ‘desirable’ and more ‘delightful’ – or at least a great deal easier for users ‘to consume’.
If you’ve ever tried to use an unfamiliar enterprise resource planning systems (ERP), or even a fairly basic bookkeeping system, without any prior training, or the support of a video tutorial, or an experienced user to point you in the right direction, you probably wouldn’t describe the experience as desirable or delightful, and you probably didn’t find the system particularly easy to consume. So it’s not hard to see where Hagemann Snabe is coming from, or even where he is trying to go; whether he (and his co-CEO Bill McDermott) can take SAP along for the ride, remains to be seen.
But as Hagemann Snabe explained to delegates at the recent SAP UK & Ireland user conference, the software developer wants to be part of the new world of ‘collaboration’ and ‘ecosystem innovation’ where business software ‘empowers people’, and the CEO has found his role models. ‘Apple has not only redefined the computer and the device. Because of the technology, and the ease of consumption, Apple’s also redefined a whole bunch of industries,’ says Hagemann Snabe, and SAP would like to be just as transformational.
Not unlike a life changing visit the CEO apparently made to the computer games developer Electronic Arts, after which, he returned to SAP with a pretty big ask for its software developers. ‘I want to see visible joy in seven minutes,’ he informed them, because EA has a rule: ‘If they don’t see visible joy in seven minutes the game will be a flop.’ Coming up with an ERP system that’s can provoke this sort of emotional reaction is no small undertaking, and Snabe acknowledges that it will take time; but he’s planning for a future where the Facebook generation will refuse to settle for anything less.
You may, or may not be surpised to find that Haggeman Snabe is not alone. Ask a random sample of business software developers what they are doing to make their systems more user friendly, and if their responses are anything to go by, the ghost of Chritmas Yet to Come is haunting them all. ‘Generation F are more interested in time, and doing things quickly,’ says Stuart Lynn, the head of R&D for the Sage mid-market division, adding, ‘they want everything to be a two second job’, and they don’t want to do a training course before they can use a piece of software. ‘They want things to be easy to use,’ he adds. And what of the social networking tools currently so popular with the next generation of business software users?
‘You could burn loads of money integrating them into your products, but longevity is an issue,’ says Lynn. So while Sage is building more collaboration into its systems, it’s not rushing into anything. ‘You can access interactive work spaces from within the products, and you can put Instant Messaging [IM] in, as we mash it up so that it seems to be part of the Sage product,’ he says, reflecting some social networking trends, but the developer spends a lot of time doing proof of concepts before it makes changes, because as he adds: ‘Some of these things are just fads, and we don’t want to jump too fast.’ But Sage is repeatedly reassessing the usability of its products.
Likewise other software developers. Over the past couple of years, Epicor, has also been making its systems easier to use, and building more collaboration into them. At a basic 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 IM and presence to ERP, so that people can communicate more effectively while they are working. ‘If you are viewing an order, for example, you can see everyone who has touched it at any time, communicate with them using VoIP or IM, and capture everything against the order,’ explains James Norwood, a senior vice president in marketing at Epicor.
Epicor has also used wikis to build a business glossary around enterprise key performance indicators (KPIs), and tagged them, so that they can be searched. Drop down menus are all very well, but they have limitations. ‘Younger people coming in ask “what’s a menu?”’ says Norwood. ‘They expect to be able to work with search; they want to Google.’ Epicor also enables the composite development of applications – or mashups – bringing KPIs, analytics and transactional systems together to make something new. ‘So you can look at a journal entry in finance, and you can have on the same screen two budgets for the last quarter, or month, or year, and view it all graphically,’ adds Norwood.
This may be a far cry from making ERP systems and other business and accounting-type applications either ‘desirable’ or ‘delightful’, but software developers are learning from games developers in other ways. Epicor recently announced its role based analytics Smarter Business Intelligence Initiative: ‘It’s about delivering the right information to the right users at the right time based on their business role and their company's business performance goals,’ says Norwood, and providing users with access to self-service tools that they can use to meet their own BI needs, without the involvement of the IT department.
Unit4 has already done something similar with its role-focussed ERP, Aggresso Business World. ‘We’ve made more things DIY, and put more control into the hands of users such as finance officers,’ says Ton Dobbe, vice president of product marketing at Unit4, making the software much more intuitive, so that users can work more quickly and more easily. Likewise ERP developers including NetSuite and Microsoft. When MS Dynamics NAV 2009 was released it introduced personalised ‘role centres’ corresponding to 21 key roles. These made it easier for users to navigate 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.
But in the longer term, it could be the advances that Microsoft has made in the world of gaming that most radically reshape the way that we use business software. Microsoft’s recently released gaming control system, Kinect for Xbox 360, uses a camera, depth sensor and sophistciated computer vision software to identify gamers, track their movements, and interact with digital objects using gestures – think Ninetndo Wii, but without that nasty intrusive physical contoller. The Kinect sensor also uses a microphone and voice recognition software to give users voice control over the Xbox media player interface.
Now you might be wondering what an immersive gaming system has to do with business software, but Microsoft is not without ambition in the area of man-machine interfaces. It has already demonstrated an office of the future where voice, touch and gesture recognition are used to control computer devices, where the desk is a multitouch surface computer, and the walls are a digital display that can switch to create new workspaces or display virtual to-do lists. It knows that the more layers of technology you can remove from the interaction, the more engaged people feel – something that also happens when you give them more personal control.
The sense of ownership you get from creating your own personalised ‘role centre’ for your work (Microsoft Dynamics), isn’t a world away from the sense of ownership you get when you have created your own personal space on the internet (Facebook and MySpace). If at least some of the fun (or joy) you feel when you are playing a computer game be replicated when you are working with a business software application (and this is a very big ‘if’), or used to make it a great deal easier ‘to consume’, then maybe it’s only a matter of time before ERP systems are transformed into something more ‘desirable’ and more ‘delightful’?
