Friday, December 18, 2015
The Failures of Enterprise Application
So why are enterprise applications hated so much ? Ever seen an employee wanting to try Oracle or SAP ERP as much as he/she wants to play around with the apps on their mobile phone ? Why is that so ?
Enterprise Applications have failed to embrace mobile. Business software has always been way behind consumer software when it comes user friendliness. Thats why scenarios like the above keep happening. No wonder business software did not care about mobile devices - despite mobile devices being the most common point of information consumption in the world. But then was business software ever written keeping the user in mind ? Or was it written keep central, administrative units in mind ?
End users are now used to slick applications like gmail and messenger - on desktop and even more on their mobile devices. A quick introspection of your usage behavior will reveal how much you are addicted to mobile devices and their apps. Hence such users, gen Y and later, will expect the same level of user friendliness from the applications they use at work to do their business. But current ERP players hardly have any mobile capability. Their Consumer counterparts have left them far behind in terms of mobile experience.
Apart from salesforce there seems to be not other enterprise companies which have been able to integrate themselves with mobile applications a lot. It took about a day to figure out how to configure Oracle Taleo and Fusion mobile app for Iphone. It was not supported yet on Android at the time of testing. Oracle Ebusiness suite is more or less not app-supported on mobile devices. Even after configuring the Oracle Tap app it was distressing to see how little functionality has been given on the app. It is pertinent here to note how Yahoo, that internet behemoth and icon. struggles simply because it missed out on the mobile revolution.
With so much enterprise data and history and information stored in those gigantic ERP databases it is a shame that they are not available for mobile consumption. A simple way to bring down Oracle ERP or SAP is to make your ERP utterly mobile friendly - that alone will increase consumption of your ERP data. Will Google rise up with a new ERP ? Maybe Open source players ?
Enterprise Applications have failed to embrace mobile. Business software has always been way behind consumer software when it comes user friendliness. Thats why scenarios like the above keep happening. No wonder business software did not care about mobile devices - despite mobile devices being the most common point of information consumption in the world. But then was business software ever written keeping the user in mind ? Or was it written keep central, administrative units in mind ?
End users are now used to slick applications like gmail and messenger - on desktop and even more on their mobile devices. A quick introspection of your usage behavior will reveal how much you are addicted to mobile devices and their apps. Hence such users, gen Y and later, will expect the same level of user friendliness from the applications they use at work to do their business. But current ERP players hardly have any mobile capability. Their Consumer counterparts have left them far behind in terms of mobile experience.
Apart from salesforce there seems to be not other enterprise companies which have been able to integrate themselves with mobile applications a lot. It took about a day to figure out how to configure Oracle Taleo and Fusion mobile app for Iphone. It was not supported yet on Android at the time of testing. Oracle Ebusiness suite is more or less not app-supported on mobile devices. Even after configuring the Oracle Tap app it was distressing to see how little functionality has been given on the app. It is pertinent here to note how Yahoo, that internet behemoth and icon. struggles simply because it missed out on the mobile revolution.
With so much enterprise data and history and information stored in those gigantic ERP databases it is a shame that they are not available for mobile consumption. A simple way to bring down Oracle ERP or SAP is to make your ERP utterly mobile friendly - that alone will increase consumption of your ERP data. Will Google rise up with a new ERP ? Maybe Open source players ?
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