<i>Design matters more than the feature checklist</i><p>Not in any enterprise I've ever serviced.<p>What enterprise people really need to know:<p>I already know from existing reporting that 984 orders (18% of our backlog) are already past due. For those
984 orders:<p><pre><code> - How many are for one item and how many are for multiples?
- Do we own what we owe those customers?
- If we do own it, is it in the proper warehouse?
- If it is in the proper warehouse, can we find it?
- If we can find it, is it undamaged and certified?
- If it's shippable, do we have enough labor to ship it?
- If it isn't certified, how soon can QA certify it?
- If it isn't in the right warehouse, can we move it?
- If we don't own any, where can we get some?
- Which vendors have it on the shelf?
- Which vendors do we have blanket purchase orders with?
- Which vendors do we have contracts with?
- Which orders can be split to satisfy a partial?
- Which orders are for customers already on credit hold?
- Which customers are threatening not to renew with us?</code></pre>
and (ironically) the most asked question of all:
- Which orders must be shipped to hit our quarterly numbers?<p>Enterprise solutions better answer these questions. If they're pretty, that's a bonus, but well designed tools that don't answer these questions are just lipstick on a pig.
Design and usability do matter, indeed. Most enterprise applications fail miserably in that respect. However, I'm wondering how or if it is possible at all to disrupt common enterprise software segments such as:<p>- document management
- time tracking
- issue tracking
- project management
- information management<p>For all of these there already are great solutions. Most enterprise companies still to stick to the SAP, IBM and Oracle solutions they're used to, though. Part of the reason for this is bureaucracy and aversion towards change. Another issue is support. Companies like IBM can agree on extensive support and SLAs, which startups or SMEs certainly cannot. Finally, there's this well-know issue that the people the software is sold to most of the time aren't those who in the end have to use it.<p>Anyway, I think the enterprise market is very interesting because there's lots of money and potential in it.<p>So, what do you think would be interesting areas of enterprise software to tackle?
Truly the only blog title which could top this would be
"Return of the ScrumMaster"<p>I will not be holding my breath for
"Attack of the beanlet containers"
2013 is the year of <i>open allocation</i>: <a href="http://www.quora.com/Software-Development-Methodologies/What-is-Open-Allocation" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/Software-Development-Methodologies/What...</a><p>As the bubble deflates (slowly, because it came up slowly) engineers are realizing that they're probably <i>not</i> going to make $50 million on their 9th-employee startup equity and retire at 27, which means they need to optimize for something different: plan B, for most of them, is interesting work and career development. This is to the detriment of companies that "seem like" they could be worth billions based on macroscopics, but that really don't have better cultures than any other corporation. However, it provides an opportunity to drink the rest of the tech world's talent milkshake: learn from companies like Valve and Github and build a culture actually worth caring about.
Enterprise needs to wake up as a matter of sustaining their advantage, otherwise a startup like Airbnb can eat them for lunch. With social media the market can shift dramatically towards any service that can deliver superior value to customers. So in my view Enterprises are driven much more by fear than any inherent need to serve better. Whatever the case may be, it does open up opportunities galore for astute startups, that have patience to deal with Enterprise quirks.