I was reading through my RSS feeds this morning, my regular morning research, and I came across an interesting post discussing Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst's keynote from the Red Hat Summit in Boston yesterday. I won't rehash the post, you can read that for yourself, but in reading it two concepts came out that are worth digging into a bit more. The first is the concept that CIO's are under siege from end users who want an enterprise user experience that is comparable to the experience they have on the consumer web (something I've written about may times, here are 2 posts). The other concept is, do end users really want to continue down the path of bloated software that adds new feature after new feature in the standard software vendor model of incremental innovation in release after release designed to entice perpetual upgrade and maintenance (and continued cash flow)? As I think about these concepts and Jim's keynote it strikes me that this is really the intersection of several issues that could be leading us back to the concept of "good enough" software. What do end users want out of enterprise software anyway?
Looking at this from the business user's perspective, not IT, I'd say that when I talk to people about enterprise software the focus is almost always on doing some task or solving some problem(s) (maybe that's the same thing, actually). Think about it, in the end software is about getting your job done in an efficient and effective manner with some improvement in productivity over doing the same task without the software tool. It's that simple. So maybe that is, in some ways, counter to the way we have looked at the enterprise software market. In our software vendor / IT "more is better" mind set, year after year we pack more into the products. From the vendor perspective this makes sense, offering more features should entice customers to renew maintenance contracts and purchase new seats. From the IT perspective, offering end user constituents more functionality seems like a logical value added approach.
The social web with's its proliferation of free, easy to use, simple apps has changed end user expectations of the software they use. IT and CIO's are "under attack" to provide a user experience that mimics employees personal web experiences. In the "bring your own" workplace that the social employee is creating IT control is slipping. Employees want simple tools that empower them to get their jobs done. One of the CIO stories that was shared at the Red Hat summit was one of a CIO who was approached by the CMO with a project request. The request was for a way to enable marketing staff around the world to build docs together and perform other collaboration tasks. The CIO consulted his apps development team and response came up with an estimate time of delivery of $14M+ and a delivery timeline of about 9 months. The CMO's reply..."what are you talking about, I was describing my daughters science project and they were using Google Docs for free?"
I wrote yesterday about activity streams and how they could be one path to a simplified enterprise user experience. On a broader look though, one has to wonder if we aren't at an inflection point where a wider change in enterprise software and the business models surrounding it is necessary. This doesn't even take into account things like platform as a service offerings, where for less money and in less time end users could get apps that are almost exactly what they require. It's early for PaaS but in a good enough world, PaaS has a huge potential for disruption. Is good enough, good enough?
Tags: software, social web, web 2.0, Red Hat, PaaS
