Michael Krigsman blogs at his IT Project Failures in response to a Robert Scoble post asking why enterprise software isn't sexy. Vinnie Mirchandani also responds on his Deal Architect blog. Scoble is asking why enterprise software doesn't get more press, and Krigsman and Mirchandani hold that it doesn't get press because it's doing important things. More likely it doesn't get press because your everyday blog reader doesn't really want to know about the software that processes invoices and manages supply chains, nor should they.
But I think this misses the point. It's not just your person on the street that doesn't care. The people that use this software every day don't care about it. A lot of people use software from SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft but very few of these people view the software as anything other than a necessary evil. I don't think it's unreasonable to attribute this lack of interest on the part of actual users to a lack of sexiness, usability, humanization, etc. on the part of the software.
So back to Scoble's question: Why the lack of sexiness?
I believe it comes down to a tendency to discount aspects of software that encourage use because in the case of enterprise software we can require use. This, of course, despite the fact that you can both require and encourage use.
Because of this mentality, and the resulting software (or vice versa), people don't care about the software they use every day. Not caring results in resignation and a cycle develops under which individual employees don't have and don't expect to have control over their software, their business processes (enshrined in the software), or their workflow (also increasingly in the software). This begins to shape up into a recruiting and retention issue because people who care won't want to work with software that they can't control. But it's also a issue because we leave a huge amount of business and user interaction expertise on the table when designing enterprise software for resigned users.
Now, that's money on the table, but I think the amount of money on the table here is dwarfed by the loss of whole areas of enterprise software. Companies are just starting to try to figure out social software and the jury is still out on this area, though there are some positive signs. How about user-controlled business process modeling, even just for analysis processes? Most people are still using Excel for this.
One area of enterprise software that has been an unmitigated failure is the knowledge management arena. A big part of problem is the fact that people have to be able to integrate the KM software into every aspect of their workflow in order to achieve the necessary level of information transfer into a knowledge management environment. Enterprise software traditionally doesn't enable this type of user control, so failure ensues. Sure, documents show up in KM repositories, but a working knowledge management system isn't really about the documents, it's about ideas and knowledge diffusion.
This is all especially concerning when we have Gartner analyst/VP Jeff Mann holding that "social interaction is the way most value is delivered in the modern work environment" and that "by 2012, the primary role of business networks will be to support social interactions, not routine business transactions." (Yes, I really love this quote.) I assume that Mann includes social knowledge creation in his calculus.
I think we can agree that un-sexy software probably doesn't do a very good job of enabling social interaction. And that's a big problem.