How Social Media is changing the face of Enterprise Applications

By Dan Matthews


Our Customers are being challenged by an ever more complex and demanding market and globalisation is the key driver of this change. It's far from a new phenomenon but the economic climate has catalysed the need for businesses to look beyond stagnant domestic markets and expand operations into emerging and growing economies. As a result, the way businesses operate is increasingly complex with offices in locations all over the world, a decentralised knowledge base, and global supply chains and dispersed virtual teams that must collaborate and work together irrespective of location.

As business gets more complex, the IT applications and systems that support it need to do the exact opposite - getting easier to use and helping simplify the process of collecting and using business information. Enterprise applications are hugely powerful and yet are only as good as the information that resides within them. This means that employees of all ages at all levels of the business need to be comfortable and confident in using them in order to maximise the benefits. User resistance can be a big contributor to IT project failure and a lot of this comes down to a poor user experience of dated, clunky user interfaces. In order to get people using business applications, you have to make interacting and engaging with them more satisfying.

Evolving expectations
In parallel to this growing business need, user expectations have irrevocably changed - having a direct impact on enterprise application development. This usability evolution can be attributed largely to the internet where any solution has to be so intuitive that it can be used without prior training or knowledge, and the phenomenal uptake of social and online media.

Users are now accustomed to the highly simplified but very powerful applications they encounter on the web and are wondering why their enterprise tools cannot look and feel the same way. Any interface they use must be familiar and comfortable, they expect it to be intuitive and if it falls short of their expectations, they will quickly lose patience.

After all, one of the key reasons for installing enterprise software is to simplify the running of business processes so that decision making can be improved. In order to better understand what users were looking for from Enterprise applications, last year we commissioned an international survey of more than 1000 business IT users looking specifically at usability.

Associated Link: More: How social media is changing the face of enterprise applications

Passwords that are Simple - and Safe
Source: MIT Technology Review, 29 July 2010
 
Researchers at Microsoft have come up with a way to create easy-to-remember passwords without making a system more vulnerable to hackers.

Coercing people into a Brave New digital World
Source: Spiked, 27 July 2010
 
Does a government-backed campaign to get the entire UK adult population online threaten to make cyber slaves of us all?

iPhone 4 one month on – A user experience and functionality success, despite antenna issues
Source: Webcredible, 26 July 2010
 
Webcredible Senior Consultant, Abid Warsi suggests that the impressive functionality and user experience of the iPhone 4 is enough to overcome the widely reported technical issues, thus proclaiming the device a big success.

Darwin City Council Website - Australia’s Most Usable!
Source: Loop11, 24 July 2010
 
Darwin City Council came out on top in a recent website usability study of Australia's capital city councils. The aim was to discover which of the six council websites was the most user friendly and usable.

Digital Design Jobs first to experience Growth
Source: UN, 23 July 2010
 
The marketing and design industry in the UK is seeing strong signs of renewed confidence, according to the new European Market Eye report from the industry’s specialist recruitment consultancy, Aquent.

Usability at a Glance
Source: usability-ed, 22 July 2010
 
Something interesting and useful to print out and stick on your wall.

Google may know your Desires before You do
Source: New Scientist, 21 July 2010
 
In future, your Google account may know your birthday and anniversaries, consumer gadget preferences, preferred hobbies and pastimes, even favourite foods. It will also know where you are.

Closing the Usability Gap between Enterprise Applications and Consumer Web Applications
Source: Integrated Solutions for Retailers, 20 July 2010
 
New White Paper on Workforce Management and the increasingly ancient software which controls it.

Collect Words, not just Numbers with Feedback Analytics
Source: CMS Wire, 19 July 2010
 
Tracking visitors’ behaviors online can help us understand how customers use a site - but what if you could actually ask each individual a question? That’s what Kampyle aims to do with its feedback analytics tools.

Back to the Future...
Source: ZDNet, 17 July 2010
 
Always a popular sport, comparing the PC with the motor industry is as relevant as ever.