The rise of the Enterprise designer

Poorly designed enterprise products is no longer an option for any organization

In the last decade, the divide between consumer & enterprise applications has grown far apart. One world where usability and user satisfaction is part of the success criteria and the other where it’s not. Not at all.

We order taxis on our phones but still uses Excel sheets to make business decisions.

There are a few reasons for why we have this divide today. First, it’s usually not the end user that is the buyer of the software. Enterprise software is often bought via a procurement process handled by executives. In short, the organization appoints a steering group to define system requirements, create an RFP (request for proposal) to some selected vendors that will prove why their software fit their needs. The final software is bought & implemented by thousands of users that will “just have to manage”. Usability issues will be identified when they breach the acceptance area of usability

If your applications don’t reside in the acceptance area multiple negative consequences is will be created. Most employees want to make the best use of their time and faulty software will create not only dissatisfaction & performance issues but also software workarounds (use of non-sanctioned applications) & loss of data compliance. In comparison to the consumer market, the user will delete the application if they step outside the acceptance area & probably won’t come back either.

The new paradigm of enterprise design

In the last 5 years, all major enterprise software companies have started a fundamental shift towards design & great user experience for business users. Enterprise users need to be delighted of using the software while being efficient. In particular, its three different trends pushing this change.

1. From customization to extension

In the last 20 years, all larger organization had to customize standard enterprise software to fit their processes. The method was to change & add code to the standard product. After decades of customization’s the IT-infrastructure is often not particularly agile or cost-efficient enough to handle modern innovation projects at scale.
But now we are moving into a more cloud-based IT-environment where extensions are used. That you enable your “old” IT-infrastructure to send out/receive/change data to new applications where magic can happen..

2. The sales executive is no longer king

Sales have always been seen as the most valuable employee in enterprise software companies. The new paradigm has instead created the need for people that can create & deliver software with high usability & user experience.

1. Standard solution designer: The designer that designed standard solutions for the enterprise software company that then is sold to customers. They spend years developing software that will enable “the big chunk” of companies to run the applications with as few extensions as possible.
2. Extension designer / Enterprise designer: Almost every organization will have to extend some capabilities to make standard solution fit their best practices or wishes. These custom applications need to be designed & developed as any consumer app. This would be creating an application helping machine operators in a shop floor to perform a certain assembly that otherwise would require a range of different software. The reason why design plays a big part here is that an enterprise designer will have to investigate, understand & design an application based on the users need & the business requirements.

If a new application saves the machine operator 30 min per day with an average of 250 work days a year equals to 125 hours per year. With the average American machine operator pay of circa 18 dollars, it totals to 2 250 dollars. With a smaller manufacturing company of 2000 machine operators the yearly savings would be 4.5 million dollars.

Today’s enterprise designer is there to make applications and work flows great, enjoyable and adoptable for the end-users. They will build the last 20% that standard solutions were not built for. Therefore the reason why the enterprise designer is the new king is that happy end-users will increase sales far better than any sales campaign or fancy presentation.

3. Enterprise design requires multi-disciplinary skills

The work of enterprise designer needs to be cross-functional. She/he needs to be able to translate complex requirements from IT & business operation into the design. They have to develop the application requirements from stakeholder workshops, understand the end-user via user research, design prototypes that remains within reality & then be able to prove it’s business value.

A designer that understands the concept and usage of SAP functional locations is invaluable to SAP.

The fact is that for skilled enterprise designer, things like enterprise data & processes is a play ground. They have the users, historical data & the technology to re-imagine each part of any processes.

They can act as the bridge between the old and the new.

But the real reason why the enterprise designer is rising is that you can design the perfect system for your users before writing a line of code.

Modern design thinking & end user focus is there to make applications right from the start. The enterprise designer make sure that applications never leave the acceptance area of usability.

// Leon Eckervall, Business Designer at SAP Nordic.