I’ve just read Stephen’s note on the iPad in the enterprise. (Gartner subscription required) here is the summary.

CEO Advisory: Seize the iPad Opportunity Now

The Apple iPad and associated ecosystem are likely to disrupt existing technology usage profiles and business models. CEOs should take a moment to ensure that the potential opportunity is being seriously evaluated inside their enterprises.

It got some press coverage here.

If I was working in an HR IT department, I’d buy one myself and give it to the HR VP. I’d make sure that it had a simple dashboard (check out roambi as an example)  with half a dozen HR and business relevant measures on, some relevant alerts and their email, key presentations, some budget stuff and the Dilbert widget.

Then let him/her loose on a meeting with other executives.

I reckon you’d get a really good ROI on that iPad investment come bonus time. You might also get a whole lot more budget for a proper HR analytics project.

I’ve rambled on about the iPad and UI a couple of times.

I’m on the look out for innovative UI work in the HCM technology space. Both Kronos and Cybershift recently impressed me with their UX work for time & attendance management on the iPhone. Vendors, if you have done something innovative on the iPad, do let me know. Users, if you are actually using the IPad in an HR context I’d really like to know more.

It has given Steve Jobs a sales force that he didn’t know he had. It seems without really planning for it, the iPad has become the must have enterprise device.

But what I’ve not yet seen is the must have enterprise application on the iPad. Yes, I’ve seen some neat repurposed reports and simple entry screens  but I’ve not yet seen an application that makes me sit up and say wow, that is a new and fundamentally better process enabled by the device.  So far the innovation is all about Apple.

If the iPad  means that enterprise software companies build executive dashboards and actually get executives engaging with the software, then fine, okay, that is an improvement from where we are today, but it misses the big opportunity.

Just  fixing the executive user experience has a whiff of the Potemkin about it. It would be a whole lot better if the iPad helped to prompt a rethink of how everyone interacts with enterprise software. Today the iPad merely illustrates the chasm between the typical enterprise software user experience and delightful design.

Yet it is a sad indictment of analytics space in that vendors can quickly cook up engaging, immersing and rich dashboards for the World Cup, whereas most HR dashboards are poorly designed, unimaginative, dull and have very limited adoption. 

• My advice to analytics vendors. Take the learning from how you have visualized football players and apply it to your workforce analytics offerings.
• My advice to HR departments. Look at the World Cup dashboards and do it with your workforce data. You have the data, you have the tools. By the time Germany are crowned champions in a few weeks time you could have it built and deployed.

It works for Lance.

I’ll admit to doing yoga poses while on client phone calls. Nothing like a tree or butterfly pose to focus the mind while discussing ERP upgrades or SaaS talent management vendors.

In my ever widening search for obscure metaphors, it seems to me that enterprise applications are a bit like cyclists. Unless they get stretched regularly, they loose their suppleness. They become rigid, which eventually undermines performance.

So many ERP and HCM projects start with good intentions. The project drives change, and then you go live. Then you stop stretching.Things ossify.

Can your system still touch its toes?

• Do you have people in your organization who can help the systems flex or do you need to get in expensive SI resources to make changes?
• How easy is the product for business experts to configure?
• How can you easily test configuration changes?
• More than these though, get over the idea that going live is the end of change. It should simply be the beginning.

Some of this is about the inherent suppleness of the technology, but even the most flexible technology turns rigid if you don’t embrace continuous change.

The session I’ll be leading will digging into UI and usability options and challenges. We will present an extensive survey we have done on SAP UI perceptions, and look at options with SAP and third party tools.

I’m receiving an increasing number of client calls about UI/UX options, be it making the best out of SAP, or alternative tools that augment or replace the standard UI experience. There has been a big growth in tools and options to improve user experience, especially for self service and transactions like sales order entry.

I’m expecting to write some research with Jim Murphy on SAP UI options and roadmap later this year too, so I’m on the look out for Ui innovations in the SAP world.

There is significant appetite for a better user experience, but it is easy to get carried away with the tools.  A client research note published by my colleagues Ray Valdes, Eric Knipp and David Mitchell Smith on HTML 5 and Flash makes for sobering reading. I’ll quote a bit that is relevant here.

The average enterprise will continue to make ineffective use of any and all available UI technologies. The root problem is not lack of powerful UI technology. Instead, the root causes for a suboptimal user experience consist of lack of appropriate process and governance, and lack of a genuine commitment to a quality user experience. Such a commitment would lead organizations to adopt a user-centered, usability-oriented development process. Rather than taking these steps, we see a lot of projects that are “stakeholder-driven” (i.e., driven by internal politics). Very few organizations center development around user needs by relying on objectively measured data about user behavior. Most enterprises don’t seem to care enough about the user experience to change their habits (in terms of processes that are developer-driven, vendor-driven and stakeholder-driven, rather than user-driven). The principles of creating effective user experiences are well-known among successful external-facing e-commerce or consumer sites, such as Amazon, eBay, Expedia or Facebook. Unfortunately, it will likely be a long time before these principles become part of the average enterprise skill set.

Developing a user experience that delights your users is not as much about the technology as it as about design. It is easy to knock the user experience of most standard software.  It is a lot harder to build something better yourself.

I hope it will be an interesting session. After our workshop the group and I  will go over and meet some of the SAP user interface team. I expect that meeting won’t be short of questions.

If you are interested in learning more about the Enterprise IT Leader SAP Peer Community, drop george dot martin at gartner dot com an email.

I you want to check how seriously a vendor takes usability, do this simple test. Have a look at the error messages. I’m not talking here about witty 404 errors, but the stuff that happens when the payroll currency  conversion field is incomplete.

If they are up to date, accurate and easy to to understand, chances are the application is too. If there are spelling mistakes, missing entries and unintelligible codes then the vendor’s commitment to usability is skin deep. 

Error messages aren’t hip, glamorous, or agile, but they are a window into the development ethos. Error messages are the canvas in a suit. 

Ask for a list of all error messages when you do your next vendor evaluation. You will learn more about the vendor’s commitment to usability and product quality than you will fathom from a slick demo.

His XING profile pinged me today, asking me to validate his skills.  The app is in beta, and it is still quite basic, but I like the look and feel. The recommendations, skills cloud and the peer validation capability are rather impressive. UI is simple and the app was painless to “install”.

Makes me wonder if you really need those complex, expensive, poorly maintained HR competency management applications behind the firewall.

  (XING is a successful business focused social network in Germany.)

Also, have a look at what Linkedin is up to via Michael Specht.

It really is time I wrote that Research Note about HCM disruption.

I was thinking this morning about what impact this device could and should have on UI design. Most enterprise applications are bound by keyboard centric design thinking, basically what I call  navigation donuts. Almost every enterprise application I see is trapped in the amber of the table layouts that haven’t really fundamentally changed since the first screens appeared over 40 years ago.

Andy Bitterer commented in a recent note. (Gartner clients click here)

What would happen if Apple built a BI product? Users would probably love it and actually use it. There is hardly another company in any IT market that is considered a synonym for great design and usability. While Apple has not been known for going after the enterprise software market and rather focuses on consumer products, Apple could still easily use its visualization know-how to create an “iDecide,” “iReport” or “iAnalyze” product that was at least as attractive as those from the best-in-class vendors today. In fact, other BI vendors could learn from Apple how to build end-user-friendly and intuitive applications.

For all the talk from enterprise application vendors about user centric design and building engaging applications, the enterprise software world could really do with an Apple moment.

Many of the applications I see would not be out of place in Miss Havisham’s Mansion. The Enterprise UI design clocks stopped some time ago, and the usability wedding cake continues to rot.

So unchanging was the dull old house, the yellow light in the darkened room, the faded spectre in the chair by the dressing-table glass, that I felt as if the stopping of the clocks had stopped Time in that mysterious place, and while I and everything else outside it grew older, it stood still….It bewildered me, and under its influence I continued at heart to hate my trade and to be ashamed of home.

image from http://chantalpowell.wordpress.com/2008/07/31/miss-havishams-table/  a fascinating blog.

“I began to understand that everything in the room had stopped like the watch and the clock, a long time ago.” “Everything within my view which ought to be white had been white a long time ago, and had lost its lustre, and was faded and yellow.”

Click here if you don’t see the screen.

Watching it is 20 minutes well spent, even if you aren’t a big spaghetti sauce fan. This isn’t a food blog.  Gladwell’s message is very important for those that design and deploy software, especially those responsible for the user experience.

Most of what he says about spaghetti sauce could be applied to user experience. There is no perfect sauce, there is no perfect UI or UX. Embrace diversity.