Entries tagged “enterprise”

Mitch Wagner has a provocative, comprehensive, and entertaining look at the recent conversations about Apple and the enterprise over at InformationWeek entitled "Does Apple Have A Moral Obligation To Serve The Enterprise Market?" Though some part of the conversation is pegged to my recent posts about the topic, I should clarify that, despite my strident tone, I don't think Apple has a moral obligation to create products that meet the requirements of enterprises. I think they have a social obligation to bring their tradition of great user experience to more of the business world if they want to really want to have the biggest possible cultural impact.

Part of my premise here is that Apple, with its focus on aesthetics and user experience, clearly cares about its intangible impacts on culture. I am fortunate enough to get to talk about these sorts of things as part of my day job, and the the people i work with who do all the smart thinking about it spend time designing for both the best experience and the widest adoption. i tried to capture that a bit in my comment on Mitch's post:

There are two parties responsible for much of the failures in enterprise IT. Certainly, there are IT departments that choose their own convenience or the imperative of manageability and homogeneity over the end-user experience of their coworkers they were supposed to be serving. I have worked in IT and understand all too well the temptation to make those awful tradeoffs.

My posts were directed much more at the other responsible parties: Vendors who aren't ambitious or imaginative enough to consider that something can be both enterprise-grade and usable.

I also enjoyed some additional thoughts over at The Mac Observer:

The primary focus was Mr. Dash's argument that his company, Movable Type [sic], achieves the desired goal, and he wrote: "You can meet all the (reasonable) requirements of an Enterprise while still creating a product that delights and inspires the people who make up that organization."

Thus, if corporations force users to use crappy tools and subjugate them, corporate users should revolt and demand more from the IT managers who are supposed to serve them, according to some. In order to assist in that process, the implication is that Apple has a moral obligation to do the same: make great enterprise products that employees love and still checks all the corporate IT boxes.

I'm not sure John Martellaro is completely accurate in his encapsulation of my viewpoint, but I found it remarkable that he managed to make this, too, a Microsoft-versus-Apple story. Hint: It's not. It's about user experience, and I'd point again to the example of Research in Motion and the Blackberry. It's a phone that, from a feature perspective, does even more than the iPhone, albeit less elegantly for any task that doesn't involve entering text. However, RIM has made a product that users are passionate about, even addicted to, while still meeting all the needs of the enterprise and insinuating themselves deep into corporate (and political) culture. Succinctly, they've changed the way people do their jobs, and in doing so, changed the way people live their lives. The iPhone is forced to be "my other phone" for a lot of people whose phones are business tools, and no matter how pretty she is, a sexy mistress is nowhere near as meaningful as a committed marriage.

All of that aside, Martellaro nails one point in his essay: "ultimately the resolution requires a cultural change". That's the part where everyone who wants to make technology for both work and play can have a hand in making things better.

Rule #1 in nerd blogging: jwz said it first. If you enjoyed The Enterprise, Apple, and Insufficient Ambition last week, you'll want to read Jamie Zawinski's essay that was so burned into my subconscious that I forgot it influenced me.

If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.

When words like "groupware" and "enterprise" start getting tossed around, you're doing the latter. You start adding features to satisfy line-items on some checklist that was constructed by interminable committee meetings among bureaucrats, and you're coding toward an externally-dictated product specification that maybe some company will want to buy a hundred "seats" of, but that nobody will ever love. With that kind of motivation, nobody will ever find it sexy. It won't make anyone happy....

So I said, narrow the focus. Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?

That got me a look like I had just sprouted a third head, but bear with me, because I think that it's not only crude but insightful. "How will this software get my users laid" should be on the minds of anyone writing social software (and these days, almost all software is social software).

"Social software" is about making it easy for people to do other things that make them happy: meeting, communicating, and hooking up.

Any more quoting than that, and it's just wholesale plagiarism. Go read the original, including the definition of "workflow".

The Premise: Anyone who creates technologies that aspire to have significant cultural or social impacts on the developed world has to focus on both our lives at home and our lives at work. Anything less is an abdication of potential, or a failure of ambition, and settling for less denies many people the chance to discover tools or technologies that can improve their lives.

I was struck by John Siracusa's 'Stuck on the enterprise', which he wrote a few days ago. His assertion:

Sure, Apple makes periodic overtures in to big business. It even redirects apple.com/enterprise to someplace sensible. But nearly every Apple product or service ostensibly aimed at enterprise customers can also be seen as a natural part of some other, "non-enterprise" market where Apple is strong (e.g., creative professionals).

Unfailingly, Apple markets only to the end user these days. ... What Apple does not do is sell products to corporate IT that are meant for direct use by non-IT employees. That is, desktop PCs, and more recently, cellular phones.

Siracusa then goes on to list a series of enterprise desires for phones that he claims look "quite different than the iPhone", mainly centering around manageability and predictability. This is followed by a contention that these aims are incompatible with usability.

This is, to be blunt, horseshit. It's apologist blathering to cover up a failure of imagination and ambition. And it's saying that people cease to become people when they're at work, and are instead Enterprise Employees. These are the excuses that let the tech industry off the hook for failing to engage as many people as it should be.

This leads to an alarmingly wrongheaded conclusion:

[T]he decision to ignore markets where you must sell to someone other than the end user is pretty high-minded (for a corporation). It's also perhaps the only way to ever create great products, products that customers actually love.

No, this decision is elitist and lazy. Here's the truth: You can meet all the (reasonable) requirements of an Enterprise while still creating a product that delights and inspires the people who make up that organization.

In fact, you have to do so.

The only tools that succeed in an enterprise situation are those which are so compelling that people choose to use them in their free time. Look at email, instant messaging, hell -- look at the telephone. These staples of business communication are so popular because they meet the "I want this as part of my life" threshold. They can even be so good as to inspire addiction, complete with withdrawal in their absence.

If you create a tool as powerful as instant messaging, for example, you won't be able to stop adoption in the enterprise -- you'll just need to add enterprise features. And to those who proudly point out that the iPhone is "too cool to ever go to work", you can't also claim that enterprise IT will have to deal with it because it's popular. Unless you want to perpetuate the myth that we somehow transform into emotionless robots when we go to work, you have to acknowledge that Apple's going to make more and more improvements to accommodate them, and that's a good thing.

Of course, I have a dog in this fight. I'd advocated for years that blogging should be an enterprise tool, and helped my company ship Movable Type Enterprise, which was the first is the most popular enterprise blogging app around. I wrote a little bit about why in "Why do you care about business blogs so much?"

For the normal people, the ones who kind of maybe have heard of blogs, but certainly haven't tried them out yet themselves, discovering blogging as part of work will lead them to thinking about how blogs can change every part of their life. It's just like the millions of people who first used a web browser as part of their job, or the people who had an email address at work or school before they ever signed up for Hotmail or Gmail.

When I talk to companies about blogging, I ask them how their Knowledge Management or Enterprise Content Management deployments have succeeded. And they almost invariably mumble a bit about "it's sort of underperforming...". This is the dark outcome of people trying to draw a line between who we are at work and who we are at home. You end up with shoddy, compromised products like KM or groupware. And the folks in IT aren't unfeeling, tyrannical monsters; When I tell them "well, we'll give you LDAP integration, but it'll also have a UI that's easy enough that people choose to use these tools in their free time as a hobby", their eyes light up. They want to delight people, too.

That's the truth of it -- if you don't change the way people work, you can't claim to be changing their lives for the better. In the developed world, we spend most of our waking hours at work, and the impact is enormous. The success of PCs in the enterprise helped indirectly subsidize computers getting cheap enough to buy at home. The requirements for reliability and stability of a lot of enterprise software makes for better consumer user experiences. And of course, most of the shopping on eBay or Amazon or most of the ad-clicking on TMZ or Gizmodo happen while people are at work too. If the anti-enterprise advocates had their way, none of us would have web browsers at work, but we'd still be ideologically pure and stickin' it to the man. Yeah!

Except we'd be sticking it to ourselves, for 8 to 10 hours a day. If you believe in a technology, like I believe in blogging, or you believe in a company, like many fans believe in Apple, then expect more. Don't settle for compromises where we're supposed to have crappy tools for the work we do -- any good craftsman takes pride in using the best tools he can.

And above all, stop making excuses for the arrogant and exclusionary voices that want to limit promising new technologies to just those who can afford to pay for them at home, or who have the interest to chase down the latest tech. Everybody deserves to benefit from this stuff.