Enterprise software sucks.
We don’t talk about it much here at hn, but think about it. Every man-made object you encounter every day was manufactured somewhere. And moved, more than once. Now add in all the sales, marketing, customer service, operations, accounting, finance, human resources, etc., etc., etc. needed to support that manufacturing and distribution. Next, add financial markets, healthcare, energy, entertainment, etc., etc., etc. and you have tons of stuff. But you don’t see it and rarely think about it. Kinda like most of the iceberg being underwater.
And all of this needs software. And most of what they have sucks. I mean really sucks. Enterprise software is so bad that there are multi-billion dollar industries devoted to consulting on how to use it, how to share it, and how to store it in data warehouses and harvest it. It’s so bad that lots of people have to dump the data out of their enterprise systems and into Microsoft Excel just to get anything done.
When Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he said because that’s where the money is.
What banks were in the 1930’s, enterprise IT is in the 21st century.
via Hacker News
In our ongoing theme around the challenges of enterprise tech (to put it mildly), we found this classic thread from Hacker News from a few years back. Guess what? Nothing much as changed.
At Enhatch, we are doing our very best to rethink the way business apps get created and deployed to users. For one, we believe most needs in the enterprise could easily be handled by elegantly crafted apps that are available on mobile devices. That is where employees are spending more and more of their day doing work and the device they are most comfortable with. But more importantly, why are we not giving business users the ability to create their own apps and their own processes that conform to the way they work? Maybe users, and not IT department or outside consultants, know best as to what they want and when they need it and how to get it done.
It is time we rob the enterprise IT vendors and raid the armies of the systems integrators, and like Robin Hood bring joy, riches, and freedom to the users from the tyranny of bad technology.
(via enhatch)
#neato 