LOBI - Another Excuse for a Rant About Poor UI Design
As I type away enjoying the delights of Word 2007 I see some a few announcements around the 2007 Office System. LOBI (Line Of Business Integration) will be a toolkit that allows users to build transactional applications into Sharepoint 2007. Many of you that have to put up with a frustrating daily UI experience can merrily consign those days as slightly irritating memories and use a UI that’s well designed and a joy to use. This of course extends the use (and debate) about Office as an application platform in addition to a spreadsheet, word processor, mail client, etc. It’ll be interesting to see over time how more people will be using Office as the front end to their ERP and CRM apps instead of the native UI. One important issue for any business has got to be the number of people that “touch” their corporate applications. I bet that in most companies no more than 20% of the employees of the company are regular users of the ERP/CRM. So what does everyone else do?
Simple, they use loads of spreadsheets, databases, pieces of paper, etc that becomes the monthly reporting pack. It takes loads of effort to produce, is never reconciled to the business application and has the general effect of confusing most people. Business applications are great (not always due to their good looks) due to their transactional processing logic. This is the bit of rocket science (I’m not a developer – this is Technet not MSDN) that tells you when you can post a transaction or calculates the results of a MRP run, the clever stuff that people buy business apps for because it stops nasty things happening such as general ledgers not balancing and ordering 200 hens instead of pens (sorry, I’ll revisit and change when I get a better example).
The point is that Office is a UI that people like and business applications provide great transactional processing logic that business owners generally like. The combination of the 2 means that the daily tasks that generally stay off the ERP/CRM radar come onto it with all the safeguards and validations that are pretty essential for the effective running of a business. This means that people who traditionally aren’t ERP/CRM users can become so, and the beauty of it is…they never know it.
I grew up without the Internet. Our children will not. It’s time for a whole generation to grow up with business applications they want to use.
