Dynamics for the masses

LOBI - Another Excuse for a Rant About Poor UI Design

andyclark — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 12:14:00 GMT

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.

Dynamics Groundhog Day

andyclark — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 20:37:00 GMT

Since we announced the 2 wave Dynamics strategy (Project Green back then) a regular part of my role is to present the strategy to our customers and partners. We have a compelling story that’s been well considered, placing us in a position of thought leadership in the business applications market. A year in and I’m still giving the same presentation albeit with updated slides to reflect branding changes and some cool new graphics (we have great slideware!) . For some people who’ve seen the presentation a few times it must be getting a little repetitive as it hasn’t changed very much. This is a good thing. The main difference for someone seeing the presentation 1 year ago and now is progress.

I recently had the pleasure of seeing Doug Burghum present at a meeting in Fargo and he made a great point that much of the work we’ve been doing is analogous to the construction of an oil rig where most of the initial work is underwater, hence no-one sees your progress. To continue with the analogy, I really get the feeling that we’re coming above the water line with Dynamics. We’re making great headway in delivering the strategy and seeing the fruits is really exciting. There are so many elements that are going to change the way people use business applications. Our advances will be about delivering applications that people want to use to help their everyday jobs rather that becoming another piece of admin. Areas such as the new client, contextual BI, office integration and the web services infrastructure will give our users a great experience with applications they enjoy using. We’ve had some independent validation by Forrester that we’re making progress stating that “With its financial strength, ubiquitous Office environment and improving analytics capabilities, Microsoft is in a unique position to redefine business application usability, and is doing so.”

I hope that I continue to give the same presentation for a little while to come. While it may sometimes feel like Groundhog Day when I deliver the presentation, it’s good to know that we got the strategy right at the start. There’s a lot of very cool stuff coming in the next year and Dynamics is an exciting place to be.

Let me know what you think.

Silly Season in the Business Applications Market

andyclark — Tue, 30 May 2006 12:02:00 GMT

One of my "hobbies" is to track our competitive marketplace. It seems that May has seen more change and consolidation in the market with merger and acquisition and announcements of quarterly results.

Here's my summary of the month that was;

JBA acquires Maugistics for $211m in cash. Expected sale, unexpected buyer.
Oracle spending spree continues with the acquisition of Portal Software a telecoms and billing software vendor
11 months after their announced merger Lawson and Intentia finally begin to work as a single company
SAP and Microsoft joint developed office plug-in code named Mendocino has been officially released as Duet
Extensity (ex GEAC) bids for Systems Union in £236m cash deal.
During their Q1 earnings call SAP CEO Henning Kagerman claimed SAP’s mid-market share to be 36%, followed by Oracle with 24% and Microsoft with 17%. The next debate is the definition of mid-market. You say potato, I say potato, let's call the whole thing a statistical fudge.
Sage posted first half figures of ₤455m showing 18% growth, although only 5% organic growth. The acquisition trail will continue under the strategy of locally developed software.
Oracle promises lifetime support to it's customers with a promise to indefinitely enhance all current solutions (JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, Siebel) with a free upgrade to the Fusion single code-base provided the customer is running a specified release version of the product. If a customer is not running the current release they will have to perform a technical upgrade to take advantage of lifetime support
In a response to Duet IBM have integrated SAP with Notes. Wonder if they'll offer the same for Dynamics?
Infor (formerly Agilisys) to purchase SSA Global for $1.4bn in cash. In the past 3 years Infor have been through 20 transactions, while SSA Global have been through 12. With a combined revenue of $1.65bn the group now occupy a top 3 place in the enterprise applications market.
SAP chairman and co-founder comments that the company is open to offers of acquisition, although he believes there are only 3 companies capable of the transaction, IBM, Microsoft and Google. SAP will not entertain discussions with Oracle, IBM is currently rumoured to be interested.
SAP are working with Kleiner Perkins Caufied & Byers to establish a $125m VC fund for investment in innovations around the Netweaver stack

Let me know what you think.

More Scenarios added to Dynamics Snap

andyclark — Mon, 08 May 2006 09:19:00 GMT

I love the concept of Dynamics Snap. Office plug-ins that allows a user to access an ERP of CRM application from within office dramatically changes the usability challenge that most vendors have ignored for years. JamesU talking to CRN announced 8 more Snap scenarios which are;

vendor management; proposal life-cycle management; customer, case and financial analysis; customer 360-degree view; expense report management; campaign management; report subscription; and smart search.

The article is at http://www.crn.com/sections/software/software.jhtml?articleId=187200163

The Snap applications we release on www.gotdotnet.com are only part of the story. When you look at technologies such as Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) the general standards of Web Service integration build into our ERP and CRM applications a powerful value proposition where organizations can build their own Snap-ins for Office applications and finally liberate their users to user business applications they way they want. As developers from other business application vendors focus their time on cramming as many fields, buttons and functions onto their screens (apparently in the name of usability) we have truly focused on what makes software People-Ready. I have a funny feeling we may be onto something…

Let me know what you think.

Have a look at http://msdn.microsoft.com/office/understanding/vsto/default.aspx for details on VSTO.

JamesU blog on Dynamics Snap http://blogs.technet.com/jamesu/archive/2006/05/03/427232.aspx

The Usability Challenge

andyclark — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 10:04:00 GMT

A few years ago I worked with a customer who didn’t like their ERP system. They found their ERP system difficult to use and as a result their people were unhappy and some left the company. The software was being blamed for bad business performance and was a focus of mutual loathing by the staff. There were internal calls to rip out our software and buy something else so everyone was under pressure.

This company felt they’d bought the wrong product, we wanted to prove they’d brought the right product, so we send in a few consultants to understand what was going wrong. The consultants worked hard to understand how to make these people happy. What they found was a number of simple usability issues that was causing big issues. Let me give you an example; an organizational level in this ERP application is “Plant”. This level refers to a manufacturing facility and sits under the “company” level, to most people in industry this is a pretty common explanation. This company was aligned to the UK Construction Industry where the term “Plant” refers to mechanical equipment such as excavators, tippers and small tools such as drills. As a result the people in this company couldn’t get their heads around why their regional office was a pneumatic drill or why they’d post an invoice to a dumper truck. There are many more examples that I won’t bore you with.

We made a number of small but important changes and made these people an awful lot happier, especially when they were confident that they were buying concrete for their regional office and not a digger. As a result the relationship slowly started to turn around until someone else bought the company and they ripped the system out anyway.

I feel strongly about software design. I’ve felt the frustration of poorly designed software with repeated visits to unhelpful help files and hours of random clicking to find what I know has been masterfully hidden by a developer under the guise of what they call logic. So many of us spend hours in front of our PC’s so good software design makes a big difference to our daily lives, bad design can push you as far as resignation, pretty extreme, but it does happen.

Working within Dynamics has been an exciting time as we release more role based user interfaces. The point is to move away from standard UI’s to focused UI’s that are based on business processes and tasks, organized around how organizations create value and how people fundamentally get their jobs done. Much has been written about how our usability teams spend days with customers understanding how they actually complete work. We’ve learnt that too many people enter data into an application as a requirement of their role, not as an enabler to get a job done. All of our software is fundamentally changing to accommodate a user’s role so we design around processes and tasks instead of “one size fits all”. The effect is amazing and has everyone who sees it wide eyed as we’re changing the way people in business use technology.

Have a look at the following links to see what I mean. Please let me know what you think.

http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/speeches/2006/03-27convergence.asp for BillG’s Convergence presentation that has a demo of our new UI.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2006/feb06/02-20Dynamics.mspx for Dynamics Snap, a set of Office System plug-ins for ERP and CRM.

Welcome to my blog

andyclark — Mon, 27 Mar 2006 21:15:00 GMT

Hi, I'm Andy Clark and I manage the UK Dynamics Partner Technology Specialist team. We're facing huge changes in the ERP and CRM market and I'd like to share my thoughts about where it's all going and the journey we're taking. Of course this is one blogger's view. More importantly I'd welcome the thoughts and ideas from all of you whether you work for Microsoft, a partner, a competitor or have just stumbled onto my pages.

At all times I'll be open and honest. This isn't a Microsoft marketing site, it's a forum for people to debate ideas, share thoughts, argue and hopefully understand our daily lives a little more. I'm excited about where we are and where we're going so I'll try and contribute as much as possible so we can all enjoy the journey.

Have fun, Andy