If you are at all interested in the development of the next generation of applications for the Enterprise space, we would highly recommend you take a look over at Dion's blog Enterprise Web 2.0. He certainly has had several excellent posts lately, this one in particular makes some excellent points: Adding enterprise context to blogs, specifically:
"In truth, complexity has always been an enemy of user adoption and is something enterprise software doesn't emphasize enough. Enterprise content management (ECM), an enterprise big brother of wikis, is famous for its blizzard of complex features, which helps justifies the price tag but all too often doesn't help the content producer or consumer very much.
Balancing true ease of use with rich capability does appear to be vital for maximizing and sustaining user adoption and even cutting support costs. My experience tells me that enterprise software is often optimized for early adopters or getting through the acquisition evaluation process, and frequently focuses too little on the average user or the most common daily uses. "
We couldn't agree more. When thinking about where the next generation of software is going, you have to believe that at some point, users will realize that more features isn't always better. In fact, there have been a number of online software companies lately that are producing systems with the minimum of essential features in order to get the job done.
While we're not sure the extreme bare-bones approach is the best way to go for enterprise software, we do believe that the days of massive multi-million dollar software implementation and integrations will start becomming a thing of the past for the vast majority of companies.
More and more we are hearing from users that they just need to get the job done. They don't care if your software can do x, y and z if they only need to get x done- they only care about how well the features they need are implemented. This is one of the concepts we keep in mind when developing our software.
Software shouldn't get in the way of the process....it should make the process easier, more efficient, and more useful.
