Posts Tagged ‘Process’
Excel as an Enterprise Application…OMG!
About two weeks back I was at Convergence 2008 – the annual conference for users of Microsoft Business Solutions products – aka Microsoft Dynamics. During the conference I had a chance to have conversations with number of other users. Most of them were taken aback when I said our users find Microsoft Dynamics AX to be cumbersome and unfriendly. The response often was – “Have they tried using SAP or Oracle?.” I told them that our users compare it with Microsoft Excel. They often rolled their eyes. But, let us face it – people love Microsoft Excel but they hate <<Fill in your product or application>>. Why is that?
I call Excel the “two-click” system – a click to start and a click to close. It is the ultimate in “flexibility” – you can make the data in there represent your version of the truth. Everyone can… it is very democratic. Now, I am not saying all Enterprise Applications should try to emulate Excel. I don’t think they can. The purpose of an Enterprise application is to help business process standardization and business process improvements. However, often times they fail not becuase they do not do that but because the users do not know what the business process is. So, the system does not help them get their job done. They see the system as a hinderance.
Very often businesses rolling out Enterprise Applications use the application to communicate the business process to the end user – “You do not have the approval authority because you cannot do that in the system.” The problem with this approach is the users cannot have a conversation with the system – get their queries answered or understand the logic behind the setup. In the best of the cases people manage to figure out what is their scope of work. However, most often this approach only leads to frustration – people attribute their lack of understanding of the business processes to the feature shortcomings of the system.
Here is a simple test – Take away the system, Do people know what are the steps in the process, what are the data elements input/ output at each point, what are the artifacts created/ used and who else is involved at each step? If yes, then you have a business process that can be supported in a system. If the answer is no, no system can help you. You see this often in real life – a system crashes or is not available and no one knows how to handle the business process.
