Why Usability Matters

When faced with the need for a platform for internal operations functions such as HR, asset and change management, corporate and financial reporting, etc, companies have three choices:

1. Build a proprietary platform
2. Buy end2end enterprise strength platform
3. Create a best-of-breed solution, buying and integrating several niche tools.

Usually, companies decide against option 1 since it makes very little sense to spend the limited IT development budget to create a proprietary way to, say, onboard a new employee.

Options 2 and 3 are much more common and, as with everything in technology, each has its pluses and minuses.

Buying end2end enterprise platforms makes a lot of sense: 

• These are industrial strength tools that provide an exhaustive set of features that are integrated into a whole;
• The integration creates a robust dataset on which to run analytics and reporting;
• The vendor takes care of holistic version upgrades and usually provides backward compatibility;
• There is only one vendor to deal with and negotiate with.  

So why would you ever end up with the best-of-breed approach? After all, you would have to manage each tool separately, spend time and money integrating the data and interfaces, manage multiple upgrades and backward compatibility cycles, and negotiate with multiple vendors. 

Why? In a word - usability! 

Since the goal of end2end platforms is to provide a broad set of well-integrated features spanning multiple business processes and stakeholders, the usability of the platform often falls by the wayside. On the other hand, the niche players have to focus on usability to carve out their niche and continue to grow in spite of stiff competition from the end2end players.

The Value of Usability 

To state the obvious, if a tool is hard to use, people are reluctant to use it. 

While for many B2C companies, the CX experience and ease of use are major differentiation points,  quite often this is not the case among the enterprise operations platform market.

This tends to lead to all kinds of bad outcomes that negate the value of buying an end2end platform. Here are some of them:

1. The team that’s responsible for supporting the platform becomes a team of superusers and everyone else in the company gets them to do the work for them. This leads to either bottlenecks or outsize expenses, which in turn, defies the whole purpose of buying an enterprise operations platform, to begin with.
2. The platform gets customized, a lot. Extensive customization usually leads to the inability to upgrade to a new and better version and to needing more people to support the customizations, once again leading to bottlenecks and outsize expenses.
3. Employees bravely engage with the platform, but since it’s hard to use, they do the least amount required to save and exit, which leads to really bad data quality and impedes the corporation from realizing the value of their investment in the platform 

Enterprise architecture teams are usually called upon to create an oversight process to prevent both over-customization and sprawl, which puts them in an unenviable position of telling their stakeholders in technology and business to just deal with it. Data governance teams also sometimes get in on the game and try to create standards for data entry and add additional oversight. This means that the production release process becomes increasingly heavy, adding more bureaucracy to developers’ lives, increasing costs, and elongating timelines. While the effort is not lost, the results often don’t have the meaningful impact they hoped to achieve.

As digital applications and platforms play an increasingly significant role in internal operations, their makers would do well to prioritize the overall usability of these tools to ensure they are leveraged to their fullest potential. After all, even if a vendor puts a lot of time and effort into developing new products and adding valuable new features, it won’t matter if the end result isn’t practical or helpful to the people who are using them.