Why is so much enterprise software so bad?
There is a lot of very good software about. Each day I find new services and utilities that make my life simpler or enable me to perform new tasks with ease. Many are well designed, with simple intuitive interfaces and a range of readily accessible settings that allow for a considerable degree of personalisation. To pick an example, not entirely at random, dropbox (http://www.dropbox.com). This service supports synchronised folders across multiple devices and a very simple collaborative sharing scheme. It is incredibly simple to set up and use, appears very robust and is appealingly presented. It has a wide range of uses both corporate and personal. So, clearly it is not impossible to build software that works, and works well.
Why then is so much 'enterprise' software so shoddy? Poorly performing, buggy and unstable, difficult to use and to extend. I am referring to the core systems that support the work of business organisations, a term to be broadly construed and including universities as a case in point. For example, finance systems, inventory systems, record systems and so on. Particularly the large, so-called Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and corporate data systems. I will not name names, but you know who you are.
It is not as if this software is cheap. On the contrary licenses are ruinously expensive and implementation depends on consultants familiar with the arcana who are able to charge highly for their hard won expertise. Nor are the applications very complicated - a bit of data storage, some workflow in which the state of records is updated, business rules that constrain the workflows and establish data integrity, a large amount of reporting and perhaps, analytics. These are functions which are well within the range of existing practice. We should know how to do this!
Yes, organisations differ. Which means that enterprise software needs to accommodate varying processes. Few organisations however, have their success dependent on differentiating their back-office processes. Here simplicity and standardisation make more sense. I am not sure that organisations would want the degree of flexibility that many enterprise products purport to offer if they truly understood the price that they were paying.
Unfortunately even those with clear sighted internal IT functions, that also possess the power to override the inevitable special pleading that can derail the best strategies, have little choice. Some time ago I wrote in a report about the failure of a high profile ERP implementation that the product in question was 'industry standard sub-standard'. I was pleased with the jibe, the subjects less so. They sent me an expensive lawyers letter that I, and my client, ignored. I still hold to the view. This is an industry-wide problem.
We desperately need new entrants - there are some promising signs in the new generation of cloud (application) services and the plethora of open-source ERP offerings that appeal to the braver SMEs. But we need some of the imaginative companies that are innovating on the Internet to take a look at the enterprise software sector and deliver lean, slick, scalable software that serves the corporate end-user. We need CIOs to stand back from firefighting and managing the misery and be forthright and demanding in terms of software quality.