Re:Why Enterprise Software Sucks
by rstuart4133 on Saturday October 12, 2019 @12:45AM
(#21230747)
> The real reason enterprise software sucks is that enterprises have complex and unique workflows and would prefer to buy software that they can fit to their workflow rather than change the workflows of their profitable business with tens of thousands of staff who will need retraining.
Call me cynical, but as I see it the complexity of the problem grows to fit the number of dollars available. If it's a large organisation they will invariably choose something that takes a colossal number of people to install and maintain it.
I've seen this as a person who designed and built cash registers. Supermarkets selling 10's of thousands of products can only tolerate a limited amount of complexity - so they have the simplest systems. Liquor markets has less products, and so they start branching out into weird pricing scheme (eg, mixed dozen of certain wines - something a supermarket would never contemplate). Go to a restaurant and limited products, and hell even McDonald's will even create a product especially for you on the spot - how many patties would you like on that quarter pounder Sir? A regular restaurant creates the most insane products you've ever seen - how would like it cooked, what sauce, kids meal, and even "which of the items on this bill will your friend be paying for?"
You could argue this complexity does help sales in some way. Bureaucracies are special they add totally unnecessary complex to justify their existence. So the article gets it right in one way: in order to justify that ongoing money in people needed to maintain it they need a product that cost a lot, and so justify that it needs to have a lot ticked boxes. It is in the products makers interest to make the task seem as complex and yet attractive as possible.
Or to put it another way, a big organisation invariably consists of a number bureaucratic fiefdoms whose evolutionary imperative is to make themselves indispensable as possible by ensuring their is work that must be done by them in order for the corporation to function. They are constantly trying to grab work from each other in a dog eat dog world. The worst at it get eaten by the best.
I recently saw this first hand. An organisation is installing SAP for payroll. It's taken a team of 10 or 20 3 years so far, and it's not done. Hmm, I thought, they must be big. Nope - turns out they have a total of two offices. I could write a system that serves the payroll needs of 200 people in 2 to 3 years, and it would be customised to their exact way of operating and would only take one person to maintain it. So why SAP? They only reason I can see if a bureaucratic mandarin can pull getting it installed, he's got a guaranteed job managing 20 people for years with plenty of opportunity to grow it.
IT bureaucracies seem to be particularly cancerous. I suspect that is because most companies core competency isn't IT, yet reducing head office staff through automation depends on IT and everybody knows that. So IT can get away with more in the way of snow jobs than most.
Call me cynical, but as I see it the complexity of the problem grows to fit the number of dollars available. If it's a large organisation they will invariably choose something that takes a colossal number of people to install and maintain it.
I've seen this as a person who designed and built cash registers. Supermarkets selling 10's of thousands of products can only tolerate a limited amount of complexity - so they have the simplest systems. Liquor markets has less products, and so they start branching out into weird pricing scheme (eg, mixed dozen of certain wines - something a supermarket would never contemplate). Go to a restaurant and limited products, and hell even McDonald's will even create a product especially for you on the spot - how many patties would you like on that quarter pounder Sir? A regular restaurant creates the most insane products you've ever seen - how would like it cooked, what sauce, kids meal, and even "which of the items on this bill will your friend be paying for?"
You could argue this complexity does help sales in some way. Bureaucracies are special they add totally unnecessary complex to justify their existence. So the article gets it right in one way: in order to justify that ongoing money in people needed to maintain it they need a product that cost a lot, and so justify that it needs to have a lot ticked boxes. It is in the products makers interest to make the task seem as complex and yet attractive as possible.
Or to put it another way, a big organisation invariably consists of a number bureaucratic fiefdoms whose evolutionary imperative is to make themselves indispensable as possible by ensuring their is work that must be done by them in order for the corporation to function. They are constantly trying to grab work from each other in a dog eat dog world. The worst at it get eaten by the best.
I recently saw this first hand. An organisation is installing SAP for payroll. It's taken a team of 10 or 20 3 years so far, and it's not done. Hmm, I thought, they must be big. Nope - turns out they have a total of two offices. I could write a system that serves the payroll needs of 200 people in 2 to 3 years, and it would be customised to their exact way of operating and would only take one person to maintain it. So why SAP? They only reason I can see if a bureaucratic mandarin can pull getting it installed, he's got a guaranteed job managing 20 people for years with plenty of opportunity to grow it.
IT bureaucracies seem to be particularly cancerous. I suspect that is because most companies core competency isn't IT, yet reducing head office staff through automation depends on IT and everybody knows that. So IT can get away with more in the way of snow jobs than most.