The first law of software: Attract users

Enterprise IT struggles to overcome the risk of vendor lock-in, the risk of IT project delivery failure, and a range of other risks.

However, as Julien Le Nestour expertly elucidates, the biggest risk for enterprise IT is a dearth of user adoption.

With this risk in mind, Le Nestour suggests that enterprise IT revise its strategies for evaluating and purchasing software with the user in mind:

(T)he IT function needs to change its mindset and view of itself. Instead of deploying tools where user adoption is taken for granted, IT leaders must realize they're competing with other applications and need to win the employee's business, just as any product available on the consumer market.

Obvious, right? Well, if you've ever worked with or for enterprise IT, you know that it's not. All sorts of considerations go into an IT strategy: user adoption, unfortunately, is not always at the top of the list of considerations.

Taking a different slant on a Biblical phrase, "enterprise IT was made for users, not users for enterprise IT." In other words, enterprise applications should fit into the world that their intended users already live within, and not force them to learn a completely novel language of productivity.

It need not be this way. Facebook and other new applications have shown that IT need not be cumbersome to be powerful. We need more such "consumerization of IT." Otherwise, we're left with software that costs much and does little, because its intended audience does little with it.

This is one reason that I recommend that enterprises evaluate open-source applications. They may well prove to be as user-unfriendly as more traditional enterprise IT, but the difference is that their licensing allows an IT department to fully evaluate open source with users before making a subscription purchase, if any.

Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.

[WhistlingPig]

The first law of software is, Work Correctly, Matt. /scold

[hymanroth]

Bang on. This is especially true of enterprise software. Consumer facing ideas can iterate in the marketplace, having got their foot in the door first. This approach can be disastrous for buggy enterprise code.

WOW - I have been preaching this to my IT friends for years now and I always get this blank look like "what are you talking about". Ease of use has to be a major consideration. You can have software that will do everything in the world but if it is hard to use, no one will ever use it.

[cbcurran]

Totally agree that users should be the focus. The problem is that most of the innovative, creative designers and developers aren't attracted to enterprise IT. So using the Facebook or iPhone as something to shoot for is great in concept, but not realistic. For enterprise IT, I would first advocate trying to improve the systematic dialog with users. In other words, is there a process for understanding and documenting the business needs and tracing them through the development process? This is some of the software engineering discipline that has been lost over the last several years.

Chris Curran
<a href="http://www.ciodashboard.com/2009/04/16/it-keysone-skills/">IT's Keystone Skills</a>

[michael_j_x]

Unfortunately users rarely agree of what IT should do for them. There are a lot of different user perspectives, which often contradict each other. Speaking from the point of view of a Bank employee, I want IT to provide me with enough freedom to work as I please with their machines, but managers want to be able to monitor and restrict what a user can do .
Plus, there is the issue of security, commercial applications aren't suppose to protect the user from itself. However, one of the key functions of enterprise IT, is to protect the company from its users. That often means not to give the user what it wants, but give him/her what is good for the company, which is not nescessarily the same thing.

[cheeseboy]

Hyperlinks to the bible? Seriously, Matt? I can understand your not participating in Ashlee and Dave's foul language, but this leans just a bit far the other direction.