How to improve the quality of enterprise applications?

Question

Many enterprise applications I've used cause me much frustration, whether it's a bad UI/UX, sluggishness, or jumping through hoops to get something simple done. This is a completely different world from the open-source applications I've used. What problems have you had, and what do you think causes the problem? How can they be improved?

Answer 1

The enterprise is shielded from the criticism that open source projects face, and in many circumstances is a collective driven by upper management. Most of the initiatives are driven by the "reading" edge when an exec sees an article in mainstream publications on a plane, then comes and rattles the cages of the departments that they run. Generally a committee is formed that is called "the team" and they meet regularly and not when they decide they can't handle the risk themselves, need objective input, or some times protection from making decisions, hire a consultancy to come and deliver the "project".

Sometimes this process can work well when you have a dynamic team that can push back against the exec's wishes or challenge premises. The strong team dynamic can shorten the analysis cycle and in some cases a good product can be produced. Many times the team members just acquiesce to the exec's whims and make no decisions themselves and only work to carry out the exec's vision. No push back, no feed back, just subordinate common sense to collective's hive-mother who directs them.

As you can see the expense is not generated from productive work - it's caused by the series of cult of personality seances that pose for collaboration. Because the project took so long and drove up expenses, you have to live with the results. For years or until the exec moves on.

The companies that have figured that out are where you want to work if you interested in accomplishing great things. Or maybe they are a great place to work if you want a consulting gig where you get paid a lot and don't have much at stake.

Answer 2

Believe me or not I know exactly how you feel. :-) There is probably just one (politically correct) advice: Eat your dog food.

Answer 3

Have them go WHERE NO MAN HAS GONE BEFORE!

Haha. Really, though, I think the problem is overaggressive deadlines, lack of proper design, and lack of communication.

Answer 4

It's common to hear this from developers working on enterprise applications:

• It will be on the Intranet anyway so bandwidth is not an issue. Let's not waste our time on optimizing and caching.
• We'll just add another web server if the load goes high. The entire org is 15K users anyway.
• The oldest machine is a 1.6Ghz dual core so let's not waste time on performance
• This interface is a bit complicated but Phil said the guys in accounting are pretty smart. He'll have a 5 hour training session this Friday in which he'll explain the use to them

Conventional web applications don't have training session. They are designed for the lowest common denominator. They aim to optimize client, and more importantly server resources. There is no real ceiling on the size of the user base and hitting 100K users is a delight. And the criticism from the users usually equates to lost direct losses.

Another issue is that companies usually sign a contract for a software product and the software team is usually just aiming to deliver the "asks".

Answer 5

There are many aspects, but I believe the ultimate root cause is that inevitably enterprise projects are neither requested, sold to, nor accepted by the people who will use the application.

As a result, they are massively overpriced to warrant CxO attention level budgets, derailed beyond control because of the massive team required to consume the budget, "processed" to death to keep the incredibly bloated team busy, mutilated and reduced to unusability in the endless cover your ass wars resulting from the happy sunshine delivery estimates that would have worked reasonably well with a team of 5 white ravens tackeling the 80% top value, but are 10 times too short for the 100 oddball consultants let loose in the never ending trench war making 0 progress while the 5 level reporting hierarchy is nervously green shifting the news up until the whole endeavour is quietly abandoned because the amount of money down the drain is now significant enough that even the customer does not want take the PR risk of owning up to the whole fiasco.