Even in the most stuffy, old-school bureaucratic enterprises there are great people who just want to get work done. And doing so often means looking past the enterprisey systems and procedures mandated by corporate IT. Accenture is calling this phenomenon “user-determined computing”:
Today, home technology has outpaced enterprise technology, leaving employees frustrated by the inadequacy of the technology they use at work. As a result, employees are demanding more because of their ever-increasing familiarity and comfort level with technology. It’s an emerging phenomenon Accenture has called “user-determined computing.”
Right on. We salute these people for trying to be the best they can despite of the organization around them. It’s so very easy to just give up and not care when you’re being stifled by mandates written by people who care even less.
It makes us smile when we see rebel factions from all over the Fortune 500 and beyond sidestep their enterprisey environments and sign up for our products. And likewise, it makes us sad when we get cancelation notices from people who regret their need to stop using the products because corporate IT feels like they can built a better mousetrap internally. Those notices usually drip with disillusion.
In any case, it’s great to see more attention being paid to this phenomenon, even if the term coined by Accenture doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.
Andy
on 11 Jan 08Let’s not forget why enterprise technology caught on in the first place: data silos or data islands.
All of the independent systems that may work well on their own, but cannot be integrated together without significant cost in time.
Tim
on 11 Jan 08Don’t forget that most consumer technology doesn’t provide SLAs, support, backward compatibility, stability of enterprise software ....
Case in point:
- Gmail is still in Beta and people sometimes report missing email.
- 37signals doesn’t provide SLAs.
- Amazon’s EC2 doesn’t really provide any type of support.
These are just to name a few.
Neil
on 11 Jan 08I was covering this with a guy from a company partnered with several big enterprises their adoption of Web apps. My point was that if companies accept that more and more of their software can be delivered over the Web, and that more and more employees will remote work, is it still right that a CIO in HQ can dictate the software that everyone else uses? Why not choose services based on employee recommendations, and subsequently choose services with flexible data portability agreements so that it’s always easy to side with the best of breed?
Brad
on 11 Jan 08Isn’t this the entire argument about OS X vs Windows.
OS X has been designed solely for the end consumer whereas Windows provides great functionality for corporate business users.
Dave
on 11 Jan 08@Tim: I don’t put much credit in SLAs. My company used to pay a fair amount of money for a T1 line. The T1 provider had a great SLA, but our line still went down periodically. Because of the SLA, we’d get 1/2 off the next months’ bill.
A month ago we switched to a regular cable connection. I have no idea what the cable company’s SLA is but, like my cable connection at home, it never goes down and costs about 1/15th what we were paying for a T1
beth
on 11 Jan 08Oh it’s so true, large companies think it’s cheaper to develop internally and that it will better serve the companies needs. But in the long run it costs more, because the development resources are allocated for other projects, it takes longer, and is done half-assed because they can’t dedicate all their time to it.
Tilman
on 11 Jan 08The phenomenon only shows that the enterprise software doesn’t meet the user’s requirements. It does not show that the software single users choose is superior, it’s only easier for them to handle. So it’s more about enhancing enterprise software in terms of user-friendliness – that definitely is a big issue. And it’s about informing users what is the reason they are forced to use enterprise software and thus give them a level of information and understanding to deliver suggestions on improving the enterprise software to ultimately improve on the underlying business processes. Using the oh-so-cool suite of Backpack, Highrise etc. doesn’t improve a companys overall performance if data has to be entered twice or if there are places to look for information that are not available to all people in need of it just because one worker thinks it’s more cool to use Backpack etc. I often think that most people in the office are being kept away from the learnings of the age of enlightenment.
Joe Grossberg
on 11 Jan 08Tim:
I’d still rather use Gmail than Outlook. It’s that much better.
Tim
on 11 Jan 08@Dave
The reason why T1 cost more than cable modems is not entirely because of the SLA … it’s mainly due to the guaranteed bandwidth you are provided.
Cable modem is no different than a “shared web hosting server”. The more users on it, the slower it’s for everyone.
With a T1, you are provided your own dedicated line.
samb
on 11 Jan 08we used basecamp to do stuff outside of the firewall at a certain large blue company in chicago. we did it because it worked and we didn’t have to wait a year for approval or use another disappointing enterprise app. ever use a lotus team room? ouch.
carlivar
on 11 Jan 08I work for a large Internet company. The description of the enterprise company throttled by policies and such rings pretty true.
I have a pretty good viewpoint of the exact situation described. In fact there have been teams and projects here that have wanted to use 37signals products. They are denied, but not for the reason you describe (building a better mousetrap internally). No, not at all. That remark actually irritates me a bit, because it’s completely inaccurate. We are pretty humble about the quality of our internal tools. Sometimes, indeed, they aren’t the best.
For us it’s simple. It’s about the data. We don’t want our sensitive, confidential business data (and sometimes customer data) hosted somewhere we don’t control. This makes our information security folks (myself included) very uncomfortable. Why shouldn’t it?
That’s not to say that 37signals has poor security or known vulnerabilities. It’s simply a matter of control. Our data is our business.
Chris McMahon
on 11 Jan 08I’ve had 3 “professional jobs” since I left college and in all 3 I started bringing my own laptop with me because the supplied system was too slow.
All I had to do was promise the IT guy I would never ask for his help and he snuck it on the network.
Shawn Oster
on 11 Jan 08A big reason why so many IT departments even have such restrictive policies is basic CYA. At some point someone screwed up and put the blame on the tool they were using, at which point the managers asked, “well, what can we do to prevent this in the future?” and from there all control gets brought in-house, even though the systems rarely work any better.
Managers also like to be able to pick up the phone and get someone on a situation when it arises and a lot of web apps don’t have 24-hour support which bothers a lot of business types. It’s all about perception really since even most Fortune 500s don’t really have 24-hour support but they like that illusion of control.
A good example is today I absolutely needed some information that was in my gmail account but for about 2 hours it just gave me a blank browser window. Luckily I had also installed the gmail IMAP support in Live Mail so I had a copy of what I needed but that outage could have cost me real money. Now imagine a Fortune 500 where quite literally every minute means thousands of dollars lost and you see why certain types get quite jittery thinking of their information locked up in a source that they have little control over.
Every situation is different though, something like basecamp or highrise isn’t exactly mission critical so if the tubes get clogged or it goes wonky for a bit then probably no harm will be done. Problem is most people, especially IT, tend to think in terms of all or nothing, left or right, right or wrong, etc. and so have a hard time with shades of grey.
joeydi
on 12 Jan 08@samb
I have never had the experience of using Lotus team room, but I recently began working at a company that uses Lotus Notes and it is not a pleasurable experience, even coming from Outlook.
Everyone jokes around about how useless Notes is and how painfully slow it is, but we are so entrenched in it across “the enterprise” that there is no clear exit stategy. Their answer is to keep throwing more hardware at it, but my answer has been mail forwarding and Backpack.
carlivar
on 12 Jan 08I still don’t think it’s just CYA.
A couple examples:
-If an employee leaves the company it is difficult to integrate external tools into the termination process. In our case we have a cookie-based single-sign-on service for all internal web apps, so account termination is simple and comprehensive. 3rd-party apps become an exception and are probably handled manually (or at the very least require custom programming). Now multiply all the exceptions by 5, 10, 50, 100 company-wide. Ugh. Not sure why IT would be vilified for not wanting that headache.
-Apps open to the entire Internet are inherently more vulnerable than internal apps. Need I remind anyone of Rails 1.1.15? Or just take cross-site scripting. I can find plenty of XSS on all kinda of public sites and exploit them plenty (makes it easy since all the auth cookies are going to be in basecamphq.com domain or such). Not to advocate security through obscurity, but I don’t think XSS exploits of company internal tools get out much.
It’s easy for 37signals to say “Ha Ha” in a Simpsons Nelson voice at Enterprise Company, but I’d be curious what decisions they’d make running a 10,000 person company. Even Google, normally the model for enlightened enterprise behavior, has whispers of bureaucracy creeping in.
Ro
on 12 Jan 08- not all on-demand software is web 2.0 or DIY. There are enterprise on-demand applications such as Salesforce.com which are deployed in conjunction with corporate ERP systems.
- I really don’t think data security need be a dealbreaker. There are informal and rigorous security standards which on-demand apps that are serious (such as 37Signals offerings) abide by. In my four years in the SaaS biz I’ve seldom heard of serious security breaches; they tend to be user-error, and users can export data out of your internal applications too
- I’ve never seen a worthwhile internal app designed by the IT dept.
- gmail is lightyears ahead of outlook as an email client but not as an integrated mail/calendar. Proving that on-demand web 2.0 apps can walk AND chew gum is the next big step
Brad Gessler
on 12 Jan 08All applications have downtime; I have found that corporate applications are much worse in terms of reliability than consumer applications, like gmail.
I can’t get over how stupid companies are today about things like their email systems. Why the hell are companies still operating their own email servers when services like Gmail are around? Can somebody explain why my Lotus Notes account (ack!) at work has 100mb of space compared to my 2.6GB+ gmail account? And why does my gmail account work from home, on my phone, and pretty much anywhere and for Lotus, my email is stuck in their systems. Forget about searching for an email in your Lotus notes email.
What’s even worse is our company employs a team of IT “professionals” for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Then they have to pay for the servers, the server licenses, the client licenses…. and of course they have to setup some people to work on help desk to support all of the client software. I shit you not but it takes IT about an hour just to setup an email account!
Here’s a tip; if you want to get passed all of your corporate email accounts, book a domain name that is similar to your companies domain name and setup a forwarder to your gmail account. If your company is acme.com; book acme.us and use that address with your clients. Do you hate your office phone? Setup a GrandCentral account and have it ring whatever phone you want. I barely use corporate IT systems at work :-D
Don’t even get my started about IT guys! There are a lot of great articles out there about how corporate IT is falling by the wayside (thank god!).
I strongly agree that all it takes are a few extraordinary people to get things done. Whether its 37signals, Google, or a few good men in a large corporation; it all boils down to raw talent and motivation to make great things happen.
Jacob
on 12 Jan 08@Brad Gessler
I work for a Big IV accounting firm. From what I’ve heard, outside of IBM – we are the largest single user of Lotus Notes.
You asked the question of why do companies still run their own email servers.
For one, my company legally has too. On a daily basis, our associates, managers and partners email extremely confidential client financial data amongst various team member – all of which is not yet public knowledge.
As such, all computers have harddrive encryption. Only two ways exist in which someone can check their email. 1) Is through their Blackberry, 2) Is from they physical computer, not someone elses computers, but only from their assigned computer.
Because of this, we can never outsource our email servers. Even if the outsourcer provided Type II SAS 70’s, the risk is still too great.
Pronounced:Ass-enter
on 12 Jan 08I used to work for Accenture, and while I do still admire the company for many things I think it’s pretty hilarious that they are promoting this. ACN has made billions on convincing IT departments that they need to invest in incredibly bloated custom implementations of Microsoft, SAP and Oracle systems in order to lock down their IT costs by “remotely managing” users and getting systems integrated (though never through open standards, oh hell no).
Accenture also has a widely-known habit of taking things that already exist, slapping a name on them, and claiming that they invented it. You should see all the stupid internal names for crap that they have, the stuff that makes it out into the public is the tip of the iceberg.
carlivar
on 13 Jan 08This sounds like a great way to get fired (and I won’t even get into the trademark issues with the domain).
Seriously folks, if you find yourself making so much effort to get around the policies and tools of your Big Company, maybe you should just find another job?
Brad Gessler
on 13 Jan 08@Jacob
PricewaterhouseCooper is the company you work for. Yes, of course you are right because PwC is an edge case. Obviously you would not want CIA email stored on a Google email server. However, you do realize that you’re still in bed with a vendor? If a hacker breaks into the Lotus Notes databases, who is at fault? PwC? IBM? Some other vendors in between? A little bit of everybody?
Your company is also creating a situation where it is so difficult for a user to get at their data that they might start doing stupid shit, like sharing passwords with their assistants or “friend” back at the office. Do you think its good when a company employee fires up their own domain name to get shit done? Probably not, so there are security considerations there as well.
Sure, company policies “prohibit” people from working around their companies IT systems, but that’s what this post is getting at (and most people don’t give a shit about their corporate IT policies). People are getting fed up with corporate IT and taking matters into their own hands.
S
on 13 Jan 08Last year we needed an on-line collaboration tool to work with a client. Our IT service costs about 2000 USD, takes few weeks to set up, and the bureaucracy was a pain. To overcome all this, I recommended BaseCamp and it was well received.
This year, I had to use my home iBook to prepare a marketing document in Arabic because IT’s restrictions do not permit right-to-left languages and getting it permitted would have taken for ever.
Grant
on 13 Jan 08I think you miss the point. In your usual haste to make this us vs. enterprisey, it seems you leap past the fact that large enterprisey systems and compelling user experiences are mutually exclusive.
Granted, this has historically been the case, but wanting to create solid UX doesn’t remove the fact that you still may be pulling data from +20 disparate systems via a superficially smaller number of conduits.
Then again, this is what enterprisey really means. Not stogy, not enterprise astronauts, not someone worth dropping a juvenile f-bomb on and flittering off—enterprisey comes with a lot of technical debt and you can’t just file Chapter 11.
The fact that the user experience sucks for most line-of-business apps hasn’t happened in a vacuum for sure. At the same time, it won’t be solved by signing everyone up for basecamp. Unfortunately, the world of simple needs to embrace the complexity of real world environments in order to make a dent in user pain—thumbing your nose and then sticking your head in the sand isn’t much of a solution.
Wrap an ACN claims adjustment solution in a humanized interface and you start to solve problems. Claiming ruby or rails solves both the complexity and indebtedness of insurance company’s back ends would be embarrassing.
Travis
on 13 Jan 08I completely agree with Grant.
What’s we are truly talking about here is that for the most part software, regardless if it’s consumer OR enterpirse, have poor user interfaces
That doesn’t mean the software sucks!
It’s just that the interfaces were poorly designed.
Ruby on Rails can’t “fix” poor interfaces. It’s a framework.
JF
on 13 Jan 08That doesn’t mean the software sucks! It’s just that the interfaces were poorly designed.
The interface is the software. If the interface is poorly designed, if people can’t figure out how to use the interface, if the interface doesn’t do its job, then the software doesn’t work.
David Andersen
on 14 Jan 08“If the interface is poorly designed, if people can’t figure out how to use the interface, if the interface doesn’t do its job, then the software doesn’t work.”
I’ve never seen any enterprise software that fits this description, i.e the software doesn’t work. It may be hard to use, non-intuitive, and less than optimally efficient, but people find a way to get work done because they have to. Usual bugs aside, they still write to the database and process all the complicated business logic.
It’s silly to say the software doesn’t work because the interface isn’t good. It’s even more silly to say that the interface is the software. Credibility wanes after assertions like that.
Mathew Patterson
on 14 Jan 08It’s silly to say the software doesn’t work because the interface isn’t good. It’s even more silly to say that the interface is the software.
Why is it silly? Obviously the interface is not literally all of the software!
To the person who is using the software, the interface is all there is. If the interface doesn’t work, then the back end functionality is irrelevant.
Rabbit
on 14 Jan 08Run-away emphasis tag! Did I fix it?
By the way, when JF said:
It’s silly to say the software doesn’t work because the interface isn’t good. It’s even more silly to say that the interface is the software. Credibility wanes after assertions like that.
No it’s not. No it’s not. And no it doesn’t. JF said:
If the interface is poorly designed, if people can’t figure out how to use the interface, if the interface doesn’t do its job, then the software doesn’t work.
I would take all three qualifiers as a whole, and if software fails all all three accounts, then yes, the interface is all that matters.
To take this to its logical extreme, all that ever matters are the pixels on the screen. So long as each pixel is lined up and colored the way we intend, all is well.
So yes, at the end of the day, all that matters is the interface.
David Andersen
on 14 Jan 08If I take all 3 qualifiers as a whole it sounds as if software has been implemented that literally doesn’t work; it’s not ready for production use. Obviously, then, the software doesn’t work because it has been released while incomplete. That’s less to do with the interface than good software development practice.
But I don’t take that to be JF’s meaning. I’m not sure what he means but it comes across as hyperbolic and silly. Again, I’ve never seen production enterprise software that wasn’t workable. It may be horrible, but it still works.
This very comment thread is an example of the interface not doing its job. I can’t go back and edit my earlier post to close the emphasis tag. Is the software broken then? Are we failing to communicate in the comments? Hardly. It’s lacking a useful feature.
The tendency to speak in extremes will not win many converts to whatever point you’re trying to make.
David Andersen
on 14 Jan 08In short, those of you claiming “if the interface doesn’t work, the software doesn’t work” should clarify what you mean by “doesn’t work.”
Greg T
on 14 Jan 08I have been waiting for a vendor-managed solution to this issue for some time now. Services like Basecamp would only benefit from greater penetration at the enterprise level. Here is my riff on the topic:
http://ctrlshiftk.com/user-determined-computing/
Gruntled employee
on 14 Jan 08Apologies for the late commenting; I’ve seen this post only several minutes ago.
I was a bit taken aback by the author’s unfounded disdain for the people who work in the enterprise. I don’t think such attitude is going to take him anywhere.
I’ve been working in various enterprise organizations for a number of years, and I’ve rarely been in the position to meet anyone who would not try to put their best foot forward when on the job. True, there are some rotten apples, some disgruntled employees who make a conscious decision to stop doing their best on the job, but these are few and far in between to make us justify making blanket generalizations.
In short, almost all people that I’ve met who work in the enterprise are honestly trying to do their best. I would have serious difficulty imagining anyone waking up in the morning and telling himself or herself: “OK, that’s it, today I’m going to do the lousiest job I possibly can!” Anyone but a serious sociopath would ever allow themselves to think that way.
That being said, however, the undeniable fact still remains that IT practices in the enterprise are generally very painful. But it is gravely unjust to blame the employees for such heinous state of affairs. The real culprit is the vendors, not the enterprise workforce.
It is vendors who have hijacked the technology and twisted it into the profit-making scam. Then they crammed it down the enterprise collective throats, using various channels of subtle and not-so-subtle political pressure.
Interestingly enough, we never hear 37signals rile against software vendors. Instead, they always seem to choose poor unsuspecting enterprise users as scapegoats. Hmmm, I wonder why is that?
Anonymous Coward
on 15 Jan 08a year ago I wrote about consumerization of enterprise technology
http://dealarchitect.typepad.com/deal_architect/2006/09/the_consumeriza.html
now, I think we are entering the phase of con-sumerization of technology…We can call enterprise technology dull and boring and un-sexy, but the con is on us consumers if we actually believe our our iPhones, and amazon.com and our HDTVs and web services have made us hot technologists….
http://dealarchitect.typepad.com/deal_architect/2007/12/the-con-sumeriz.html
vinnie mirchandani
on 15 Jan 08I posted comment above…did not mean it to be anonymous
Rob Meyer
on 16 Jan 08“I’ve never seen any enterprise software that fits this description, i.e the software doesn’t work.”
I’ve seen tons. Corporate intranets, whose sole job it is to publish information easily, where you can’t find anything on, are probably the worst offender here. Many internal systems experience unreasonable reliability problems. Finally interfaces are generally terrible, frustrating users and causing productivity loss at least, while at the worst causing high employee turnover and retention problems.
The fact that we can argue over what success looks like with no conclusion is exactly why the issues are what they are. Success looks different to everyone. “Doesn’t work” for software is a much fuzzier concept than it is to a bridge or a skyscraper. Since we have trouble determining success, we have trouble weeding out the practices and personnel that don’t work, so we’re doomed to repeat our failures. Because “works” is a fuzzy concept, evaluations are made for political or subjective reasons rather than more objective or technical concerns.
My quick and easy test for bad software is, “Would this business process be better done on paper or note cards?” From what I’ve seen, if you remove the distributed user-base as a factor, the answer is yes. Are we really living up to our potential value-add by just enabling remote distribution? If that’s the case most of the time it would be cheaper to co-locate everyone and use index cards.
Somewhere along the line, it seems IT (in general) stopped being about serving the needs of the users, and because more about serving itself.
This discussion is closed.