The collision of desire and reality

Michael Krigsman says Scoble doesn't understand enterprise software. Nick Carr responds. Fantasy, says Michael.

Spend even a little time with good online tools and a trip into the land of enterprise software can make your head explode. Scoble and Carr have a point; a lot of this software isn't friendly. But this isn't because companies set out to deliver a bad experience. The quality of experience is a byproduct of the issues Krigsman raises: priorities, legacy support requirements, product cycle times, and technology limitations.

This is a problem a colleague and I have lived with for more than a year and a half as we work on strategy for a major financial services firm. We desire -- because their clients desire -- a unified, coherent experience online. The reality: multiple enterprise software systems, all of which are essential and have their own quirks and user experience shortcomings, conflict with that desire.

The further reality: it's an enterprise problem (both from strategic and operational standpoints), a software vendor problem, but most of all, a client problem. In our role as client advocates we keep pounding away at the need for better user experiences. And out of respect for the reality that our client's IT/Web services teams face, we look for ways to help them change the landscape, whether through changes in the development process or finding ways to communicate end user needs to vendors, so they make the user experience a higher priority.



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