By Alan Cane, Financial Times. Published: Mar 5th, 2008
It takes a geek to love complexity. Tom Siebel of Siebel Systems once famously admitted that his company's customer relationship management software was of "mind-numbing complexity".
Similarly, Dan Matthews, chief technology officer of the enterprise applications group IFS, says his company's flagship enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is too big: "There are more than 7,000 screens you can use. It is too big in functionality and in the amount of information for any human being to understand and be familiar with."
All the big software groups are beginning to deal with the issue. IFS, for example, is applying internet technologies to its software to make it easier for users to navigate and find things.
"The internet is very complicated but most of us do not have a problem using it," Mr Matthews says.
Survey after survey has shown that people want systems that are simple to use, intuitive and of clear benefit in getting the job done.
Educationalists understand this. Redstone Managed Solutions in the UK is responsible for the Web-exchange system that transmits information between secondary schools and the examination boards.
Tariq Saied, its managing director, says the feedback from the boards was to keep it simple: "We have purposely made Webexchange really simple and straightforward to use and without any bells and whistles."
What if the bells and whistles do jangle too loudly? Michael Gentle, a consultant with Compuware and author of IT Success , gives an example of resistance to a poorly thought through user interface. "At a customer relations management project at a European subsidiary of an Anglo-American pharmaceutical company, the predominantly marketing-led project team went overboard in terms of profiling physicians, defining multiple screens of personal and work related information.
"The problem was that they made the assumption that the sales reps would dutifully fill in all this additional information for marketing purposes. Needless to say, the sales reps found the screens so overwhelming that they simply refused to use the new system. The team had to backtrack completely, ultimately settling for a single screen of essential profiling information."
Buddie Ceronie, who is responsible for northern Europe and southern Africa for Avaya, the communications group, points out that an intelligent workforce will always seek the quickest way to do the job and will embrace the tools that help them.
He says: "For any technology to be successfully adopted, it must offer an immediate, recognisable, end-user benefit.
"If the groundwork has not been laid to make staff comfortable with the technology, or the user experience is not an obvious improvement, the chances of user acceptance are cut."
This has been demonstrated in the UK with the problems besetting the multibillion pound National Health Service computerisation project, a classic case of over time, over budget and failing to deliver what the customer wanted.
Philip Donetti, a partner with the consultancy Morse, says the healthcare professionals, the people who, along with patients, were expected to get most benefit from the system were not involved in the implementation and had only limited understanding of what was involved. "It meant over-runs, extra training and built a barrier to the benefits being achieved," he says.
What is the answer? Not surprisingly, closely involving the user in the specification, development and testing of the new system is a big part of it.
Mr Ceronie says. "Identifying the right trial user group is crucial. We like to look at how different groups within the business work and what technology and tools will help them to be more efficient and then give them basic training in how to make the most of this technology."
Mr Gentle argues for organisational rather than technological measures. "A top-down, well-intentioned initiative, long on vision but which effectively imposes a software solution on users stands every chance of being rejected," he says.
"If, however, people are made an integral part of the review of their business process areas and the subsequent software design or package evaluation, and are then able to test a prototype as part of the interactive process, then user buy-in increases exponentially.
"This approach also ensures that you first tackle the people and the processes and leave the software tool for last. This significantly reduces the chances of implementing unneeded software complexity."
Some very simple measures can be hugely effective in making systems easier for people to use. IFS, for example, added "stickies" to its system. These are the digital equivalent of 3M's "Post-It" notes, tags that can be attached to a file to explain a particular action, why a delivery date has been changed, for example.
Of course, the IT team could be commissioned to add new data fields to the application, but as Mr Matthews points out, "it becomes huge and people don't do it".
