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Why Enterprise Software Sucks

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Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#11

Post by ianai »

auiya wrote: post #3

In the case of taxpayer funded deployments (i.e. government acquisitions) it's generally due to being built by the lowest bidder, coupled with an inadequate incentive structure to fix. This may also be the case in some corporate deployments.

It’s also being designed and implemented in a situation where 5 people plan and oversight the work of 1 person-ish. IT is pretty horrible about having lots of know-nothings with shiny job titles telling one or far fewer people who actually do the work and know what is possible that their technical objections or restrictions are false/made up/etc.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#12

Post by pwarner »

lordnacho wrote: post #4

This is changing though. A fair number of solutions such as Slack are easy enough to use and get a hold of that teams within large enterprises can simply start using them.

Except MS is countering with MS Teams, which is truly enterprise ready in the same sense as the Twitter thread describes.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#13

Post by save_ferris »

lordnacho wrote: post #4

This is changing though. A fair number of solutions such as Slack are easy enough to use and get a hold of that teams within large enterprises can simply start using them.

The problem that companies like Slack face in making inroads in enterprise is that companies like Microsoft dominate the market, and can offer entire suites of products at a discount to keep customers exclusive to their platform.

Microsoft has it’s own internal chat tool (which is terrible), but this strategy keeps their clients locked in while the buyers stay happy

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#14

Post by impendia »

When I click on Course Tools on Blackboard, I get a bewilderingly long list including:

Basic LTI Tools, Blackboard Collaborate Ultra, Brainfuse HelpNow, Cengage Learning MindLinks (TM), Content Market Tools, .... what are all of these things?! I want to track and post grades (and export them to a spreadsheet), mass email my students, post a link to my syllabus and homework assignments. That's it.

Meanwhile, with our recent "upgrade", the option to merge two sections of a course (so that I can email both at the same time) went away. I have to email our tech support (?!) to ask them to do this. Apparently this was supported by a plug-in module (??) from a third-party vendor (??!!!) who went out of business.

If merging two courses is so difficult as to require a third-party solution, then I have to wonder about what Blackboard's codebase looks like.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#17

Post by duxup »

I used to work in support at a big company.

We went through endless Salesforce resigns with folk's who don't use them all making decisions and patting themselves on the back for each redesign. It was horrific as a user experience, everyone is a UI expert and had an opinion based on this one time a thing happened... 3 years ago... In fact most every decision was made dude to some anecdotal incident where the person who tells the story was mildly inconvenienced this one time.

Fast forward a few decades and I'm a web developer writing software. My direct customer has a website where they want updates on various things from their partners. This site is entirely for their partner's benefit, our direct customer has a different site for the same data so that they can do more complex things. These partners are barely computer literate, our partners are "power users" (everything is relative here).

So of course this site I built that is dead simple because any complexity confuses them, and by most measurements (and my conversation with the partners) it is doing well.

Accordingly my direct customer wants like dozens of new fields, options to export data and etc ... all things that their partner's never do, didn't ask for ... and don't understand.

Meanwhile I ask the customer(s) about adding a block of text in a section of the site to help guide the partner's along better .... no response. (actually I've started just adding them on my own now...)

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#18

Post by java-man »

save_ferris wrote: post #10
mjlee wrote: post #7

I'm not sure where this originates from, but the most succinct definition I've heard for "Enterprise Software" is that the person who pays for it isn't the person who uses it.

This is so true. Whoever buys it usually checks off a list of features that it needs, but has no idea if it does any of those things particularly well.

I've seen this with mobile phones in the 90's-2000's. Until Apple came up with the iPhone designed for the end users, the phones' buyers were the networks, not the end users.

The same goes for companies like LinkedIn - they are now driven by recruiters and not the end users. Thus the idiotic interface and functionality changes that basically makes it unusable [to the most of the users].

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#19

Post by rwmj »

On the other hand, good enterprise software ... Comes with an API that doesn't break on a whim every few weeks, but is stable over years or decades. Works diligently to solve bugs on a timetable. Changes gradually. Has plenty of documentation. Offers training courses. Is certified to work in highly regulated environments.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#20

Post by freddie_mercury »

I think this gets it wrong. The real reason enterprise software sucks is that enterprises have complex and unique workflows and would prefer to buy software that they can fit to their workflow rather than change the workflows of their profitable business with tens of thousands of staff who will need retraining.

If you look at all of the most successful software of all time they are the complete antithesis of the Unix philosophy that so many designers and developers prefer. Word, Excel, SAP, Photoshop, Salesforce, JIRA. People hate them because they are complex, configurable, and have 1000 features.

But that's the same reason they can sell into law firms and oil refineries and animation studios and all those other very diverse businesses.

And most enterprise software sucks because 1) writing complex, highly configurable software is hard and 2) very few companies have the billions of development dollars the above handful of companies have to throw at the problem to try to make it tractable.

That the end user isn't the purchaser isn't going to change that fundamental reality that businesses are complicated.

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