In Coming to Terms with the Consumerization of IT – R “Ray” Wang in Harvard Business Review, writes of:
” …a one-third productivity tax on the newly entered workforce — because workers have to hunt for information, applications inhibit collaboration, and legal requirements prevent business innovation.”
Businesses are spending billions on enterprise software that, even if not that old, could be a cause of massive underperformance in the workplace due to it being based on obsolete paradigms. He says IT departments should look the 6 S’s (simple, scalable, safe, secure, sustainable, sexy) in the consumer IT that they may import.
What’s needed? Social, mobile, connected, collaborative, all-information-available and not silo’d, always-on, available-everywhere, and an end of complex integrations due to complex infrastructure (rather than complexity of the information itself). A key enabler of this is cloud computing platforms. A big challenge for the adoption of cloud computing in enterprise-level applications is the integration of business data and diverse applications.
As Ray states in a comment: “In complex order management we’re still trying to integrate on-premises apps. Might as well go w/ cloud based integration and cloud based apps? Some of our clients have done this and it’s working better. Let’s see what the next gen cloud apps deliver w/ object models and better XML integration.”
Another good quote cited:
“When you and I go to work and we use a computer to work, and find that our work apps are completely onerous and the apps we use at home are quite easy, we wonder why can’t it be simpler, easier, quicker, and less expensive?” — Peter Levin, enterprise software veteran and Partner at Andreessen-Horowitz
To paraphrase Marc Andreessen, software isn’t just eating the world, it’s eating itself.