Do you see change occurring and if so, what’s driving that change? The main thing that is changing is that the buying decision for enterprise software is moving from the CIO level and into the hands of the users themselves. These users have expectations based on popular retail products and the web.
Do you see change occurring and if so, what’s driving that change? Absolutely. I think engaging an easy to use user interface has become a sales driver and competitive differentiator in the world of enterprise software.
I’m honestly much more inclined to think like Dan Rosenberg over Matthias Zeller but that is because I am a pragmatist. That being said I certainly understand the potential for skunkworks
enterprise mashups.
So the largest Microsoft Product launch of this year rolled through hogtown last week and I was there to be part of the spectacle. Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s Chief Operating Officer, was there to take us through the exciting news. You know there is nothing like a big product launch and I’m sorry but I still find them exciting .
HEROES HAPPEN {HERE} was not only about Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 it was about celebrating the people who keep things running.
It is often easy to forget about the people that maintain the systems we expect to be running (except when the sky falls) when we are so focused on new and shiny technologies and systems.
Microsoft acknowledges that making maintenance simpler and more agile so that IT staff can focus on solving problems and add real value is what everyone wants whether you are an IT professional or the business that hires IT professionals. They call this strategy Dynamic IT.
Kevin told us a story of two heroes.
Now, let me tell you a story. I want to tell you about a couple of heroes, just to bring this theme of this launch to life. And I want to start by telling you imagine it’s November 12th, 1999, and you’re in Istanbul, Turkey. And it’s the middle of the night, and an earthquake hits, 7.2 on the Richter scale. So you get in a doorway with all your family, buildings are shaking and collapsing around you, and all of a sudden all the lights go out and it’s completely dark. After several hours, the shaking and the crumbling stops. You somehow find a way to make it outside. When you finally get outside, you look around and it’s total devastation all around you.
Now, most of us can only imagine this, but this was the reality for Omer Celik. Along with everyone else in the region, they had to live and eat in the streets for five days before help arrived.
This challenging time, that five-day period, sparked an idea, an idea that Omer said, you know what, there’s got to be something we can do with technology.
So, he wanted to create something that could help tell rescue crews what was going on in the areas that they couldn’t reach or get to, somehow create a tool that would allow them to see just what they were facing and where help was needed right away.
So, over the next 24 months he and a friend partnered, and it’s his childhood friend, Oguz they’ve been friends since they were 10 years old, they partnered and using Microsoft Robotics Studio, Visual Studio 2008, which we’re going to talk about, Virtual Earth, Windows Server 2008, with IIS 7.0 and Silverlight, they’ve created something called RoboTurk a robotic helicopter used in disaster situations to fly into areas that are so badly damaged so that you can stream video back to the rescue crews, so that rescue crews can get real time feedback on who and where they need to provide help.
That is so cool. I need to get more info on that soon. I have been doing a bit of research lately into how technology can help in catastrophic situations and there is some fascinating work being done. I know it sounds cheesy but if anyone has ever worked with a government agency or body you know that they can be a little slow sometimes. Work like RoboTurk and projects like JEPRS from Infusion are like very exciting because in an emergency time is of the essence.
When the user is in control
Configurability, personalization and sharing are not considered technologies by most users, they are a base use case for their personal lives. People understand control in a very serious way, and they know when they have it and when they do not.
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A couple of months ago I was taking to Jon Lax at the Toronto Expression Around the Clock event. I told him that I wanted to focus on enterprise user experience design and he looked at me as if I said I wanted to bring haute couture to prison uniforms. It is not that the idea is preposterous it is just something that has always seemed highly unlikely.
When I’m at home using Twitter, a great example of cool consumer software, I want to be delighted, thrilled, entertained, and engaged. When I transfer money through my bank, which is certainly a non-sexy enterprise system, I demand the system work every time without fail. There’s a big difference between enterprise and consumer systems, a lesson I suspect Robert Scoble is about to learn.
By 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. Scoble’s asking the right question.
This is where the whole debate forks from what Scoble was taking about. Michael Krigsman goes on to rip on Nick Carr: Carr talks about applications being friendly and Krigsman thinks that means easy to use. This exposes what I think is a common misconception that a good experience is more than ease of use — people need to be engaged.
There are many examples of applications that are useful, dependable, interesting, very slick, but not many enterprise applications that are engaging. I think that the aspect of sexiness that is missing from enterprise applications is JOY. John Morkes of Expero Inc. at the closing keynote of CanUX 2006 talked about the Joy of Use (PPT). In this presentation there is an example of how Quicken was trying to make their signature application more enjoyable. This was well before the idea of enterprise2.0 and consumer experiences on the enterprise. Companies are aware that their products need to be friendly and that it means more than easy to use.
It reminds me of when I present interface mockups to corporate clients: they often have more than one colour in them. There is always someone who feels that they are too bright or flashy for their organization. The corporate aesthetic that prefers monochrome designs comes out of a time when 4-colour printing was too expensive for internal communications. So decades of blue on white drab has become the norm, making people feel uncomfortable with bright colours that they associate with the marketing of consumer products.
I’m afraid that consumer experiences on the enterprise will not be as revolutionary as we all hope but a slower evolution.
I hope to talk more about this in the future and it reminds me that we have not had an EnterpriseCamp in Toronto for quite some time.
I needed to add this list by Anshu Sharma. It is a pretty amusing idea, like there is a Victoria’s Secret catalogue for CIOs out there where you can ogle some sweet SaaS:
Here are five things that turn CIO’s on:
VIRTUALIZATION: A data center that has fewer wires, requires less energy and is easier to manage is nothing short of an IT dream.
SaaS: Ability to rapidly deploy new functionality without having to buy new hardware and go through lengthy implementation cycles – its sexy the way a husband cooking dinner is sexy way for a wife. Again, it takes a certain eye and maturity.
VISIBILITY: Call it Business Intelligence, Business Activity Monitoring or Complex Event Processing, the ability to have both senior executives and employees performing the actual tasks be able to get actionable intelligence is huge.
COLLABORATION: I recently attended a Cisco telepresence session and I don’t care who you are and what you smoke, that stuff is outright sexy. And so is Oracle’s Social CRM.
TRANSACTIONS: Yes, age-old transactional applications. When they just work, its sexy. The way a plain perfect old black dress just works.
Voice is Back!!! I was invited to see the launch of Microsoft Unified Communications. Looks pretty cool, really it does. I think that this is just one of those technologies that will quickly become part of our everyday lives.
DISCLAIMER: This is a personal blog. The opinions expressed here represent my own and not those of my employer. The information that I present will often be created by others and they would be the owners of that content, I do not presume any ownership of their content.
