How To Create An Enterprise UX That Doesn't Suck?

Also known as EAS, Enterprise Application Software products are a set of computer programs specially designed for the organizations, such as corporate houses, retailers, banks, educational institutes, or governments to cater to their unique business needs. These customized programs can alter the way an organization works and can solve different problems. This helps improve process efficiency, which in turn boosts the revenues. They are robust as well as scalable, making them fit for every kind of business. An organization hosts these applications on dedicated servers and, through its networks, provides services to its users with ease. Centrally managed for an entire organization, the EAS helps enable and maintain information transparency and parity across departments.

However, most enterprise software products are hard to navigate, interact with and use. This eventually results in an unpleasant user experience that sucks. There are three principal issues which, when not put into careful consideration, will result in creating enterprise solutions that do not meet user needs as well as unwieldy and unmanageable software. The three principal issues are:

Shifting Requirements

These details are essential in every business setting, and there are no two ways about it. Any enterprise user experience application development that avoids this concept is inevitably going to fail. This has been a common point of failure amongst businesses and entrepreneurs.

Poor communication

Lack of communication frequently causes immediate problems as development proceeds in the wrong manner due to a lack of understanding between the business stakeholders and the developers. But there is a more insidious problem caused by a lack of communication which is a lack of acceptance by the user base. Software projects generally cause major changes in the way that a business operates but in the majority of projects; users are not fully involved in the development and sufficient time is not allocated for change management post-development. In the major projects, we've seen with challenges, a 1-2 year development project typically is given less than 2 weeks between the date it is anticipated to be completed, and the date that users will start using it in production as their primary business tool. This timeframe is far too compressed unless all of the users have been intimately involved in the project development process which is often unrealistic.

A lack of communication can be radically reduced through a relentless focus on shipping working code. When the app code is consistently deployed working, users, business stakeholders, and developers can be united around the demo and can reset their expectations and work with requirements with a common understanding. This is the only way to have truly all stakeholders fully understanding the project and where it should progress from there.

Poor Execution is a failure both of ownership and skill

Think about software development as your own home - if, every time you do something, you were to improve or clean something, your house would improve every day. Make dinner, clean up immediately but also fix that loose handle on the cabinet. Play with the kids outside, do a little weeding at the same time.

Software is the same way - with a highly skilled team that feels a sense of stewardship over the code and has management that is technically astute enough to understand this process - every time that the code is touched, it's cleaned up and improved through a process known as refactoring. Without this intent, understanding, and discipline, software rapidly becomes unmaintainable, and every step forward in the development starts to take longer and longer. This not only kills the forward motion of a project but also makes the resulting software incredibly expensive to manage and run.

Ways on how to create better enterprise software products that have intuitive user experiences:

Promoting user confidentiality - In the recent years, the business operation dynamics and the global proliferation have evolved rapidly. Timely and unobstructed information flow is the differential power charting a company's growth to quite a degree. All this while, ensuring data integrity and confidentiality are equally crucial. EAS offers automation tools to achieve all of these.

As a result, employing enterprise quality software is now indispensable to any business wanting to streamline its processes and gain process efficiency. Organizations can combat damage due to process complexity, initiate new growth opportunities, and outrace competitors when empowered with the business intelligence.

Improving on the functions - Many professionals believe that adopting enterprise software has made everyday office work much easier, more efficient, and extra productive. In particular, for the businesses dealing with a large amount of data, EAS helps display, check, store, and manipulate information without much hassle. The technology automates the anytime, anywhere accessibility and processing of business processes dependent on complex and enormous data. In addition, the technology ensures its easy usability for the employees. Other organizational functions greatly benefiting from the programs include online payment processing, customer relationship management, project management, interactive product catalog design, resource planning, service automation, network security, and much more.

Cloud architectures - Part of the reason behind the new accessibility of enterprise software modules lies in the growth of offsite architectures or cloud computing. In the early days of integrated enterprise software systems, businesses typically invested in the purchase and maintenance of onsite server systems, which could run standardized applications and house data securely, but were very expensive over both the long and short-term. Complex systems often required the hiring and retention of a full-time IT staff, and still do.

Smaller enterprises are now able to take advantage of remote infrastructures and offsite data management facilities. For a single monthly fee, clients can run applications from a system owned and maintained by an independent hosting solution or software service provider. Service can begin or end at any time without high upfront investments or ongoing, long-term costs. This can lead to faster benefits and more rapid returns on technology investments. Your investigation of enterprise software systems should take a broad range of software suites, infrastructures and service packages into account.

Diversifying organizational efficiency using multiple types of enterprise software - The programs can be integrated with the other organizational processes to streamline many work tasks. For example, business intelligence can be synchronized with the business analytics software to fetch data. Customized management functions (finance & accounting or human resources) driven applicable are available or can be designed.

Takeaway

 Software development in an enterprise is hard. There's no question about it. But with the careful application of strong, technical project management, it can be successful every time. Fixing these issues is not simple, but the key to success is having disciplined technical project management that focuses on continually shipping working software.