Gracewood spells it out on enterprise usability

Ben Gracewood’s Novopay Technical Review for Dummies is a must-read for anyone wanting to understand why the New Zealand school payroll system is such a mess. The project is one of the nation's worst government-funded technology projects in recent history – and we’ve seen a few.

Halfway down Gracewood’s post is a revealing aside. He writes:

This is what “enterprise” software users work with every day. Usability and User Experience are pretty much dirty words, with SAP and Oracle making their money from systems that are actively hostile to end users.

Now this is interesting. Enterprise software is horrible to use. But it's not something that gets talked about. It isn’t something most industry people want to say in public. Gracewood clearly doesn’t care.

A local company once eagerly invited journalists to look at its large-scale enterprise application. The people seemed proud of the system’s new Windows 95 look and feel. That might have been an achievement in 1995, but this was more than ten years later.

Enterprise software users were still working with text-based screens in the earlier years of the current millennium.

As Gracewood says, the horrors of Novopay are:

…pretty much business as usual for Enterprise IT.

He is right. But the surprising part is that there haven’t been more stuff-ups on this scale.