A few weeks ago, a CIO at a media company told me one of his major initiatives for the next year was to put "lipstick" on his SAP systems . I nodded but gave more credit to his creative industry than a burning problem most companies need to fix (though there are more "ugly" jokes about that user interface than this post lists)
Then I read this recent BW series "It's a whole new web", and these quotes jumped out at me:
"For tens of millions
of office workers, weekends at home mean a chance to recover from five
business days of staring at a computer screen. But these days the Web
is brimming with so much creativity -- art, music, photography -- that
online visits can feel more like a stroll around Soho than overtime at
work"
"A whole new Web is
emerging from the wilds of cyberspace. It's no longer all about idly
surfing and passively reading, listening, or watching. It's about
doing: sharing, socializing, collaborating, and, most of all, creating".
Business software user interfaces, personalization and social interaction are where business suits were a decade ago. We are letting the need for high volume AP and journal data entry drive our user experience standards. We have to make business software look and feel a lot more exciting and a lot more collaborative. As Oracle develops Fusion, as SAP thinks about Web services they have the opportunity to. Otherwise folks like Dave Duffield (who redefined the rules for user interfaces in the late 80s when he launched PeopleSoft) and Marc Benioff (quoted in the BW article) will.
OK, may be we do not allow sandals and shorts, but it is time to think about Dockers in the business user experience. Realize that will need a new set of standards, but the payback in individual and group productivity will be significant especially as a younger generation of employees used to blogging, wikis and podcasting enters the work force.
