When CEB surveyed 5,000 employees at 22 global companies, fewer than 44% said they knew where to find the information they needed for their daily tasks. The abundance of workflow, productivity, and business intelligence platforms and applications has created a productivity paradox: the more apps, the less efficient employees become.
Cisco predicts that by 2020 there will be 50 billion connected devices and in that same timeframe nearly 75% of the U.S. workforce will become mobile. Executives are beginning to realize that employees may be more efficient when they can work remotely, as some accounts show businesses can gain an extra 240 hours of work per year from mobile employees. When properly developed and leveraged, enterprise applications help organizations improve processes and streamline operations to run more efficiently for this evolving workforce.
But, that’s only if their application infrastructure isn’t getting in the way.
App and software developers should only expect mobile business demands to increase across industries. This is why we’re seeing vendors like Skype integrate with Outlook. If it takes three different platforms to make changes to a spreadsheet on your iPad, the chances of that task getting accomplished dwindle. If employees are using three systems to complete one task, the user experience often suffers, and it tends to be a drain on effective time management.
I recently spoke with Ken McElrath, founder and CEO of Skuid, to glean insights on the weighty problem fragmented enterprise software is having on businesses undergoing a digital transformation. “This is such a big issue for enterprises because they are often trying to solve different problems with different off-the-shelf apps. Even when the apps come from the same vendor, companies typically end up with multiple systems of record (Salesforce, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, etc.). To create simple, truly useful apps, we need to bring all that data together to create a 360-degree view of a customer.”
Ken McElrath, founder and CEO of Skuid
Furthermore, McElrath explains that trying to “defrag” such massive amounts of data and unify it into a seamless app experience can be extraordinarily expensive. When a person has to jump around from system to system to get the data they need to serve a customer or make a business decision, productivity declines and customers get frustrated.
“Now combine this data fragmentation problem with the painful interfaces of most enterprise apps—it’s a recipe for bad customer experiences, low user adoption rates, slower sales cycles, and painful and disjointed workflows that don’t match a company’s business processes. All of this keeps people from thriving in the digital enterprise and has a massive impact on both costs and revenue.”
The reason this proliferation has snowballed into such serious bottom line issues for enterprises is because the roadblocks are many and there has been no singular solution available. McElrath explains that at a high level, the roadblocks that end users face are often a result of prioritizing technology over human needs. By starting with a human need, solutions will be more desirable to users and more efficient and enjoyable to use. To do this, we need more agile systems that can be altered at will, without taking the time and money to write code. But many companies make the mistake of settling for generic software, which lacks flexibility and kills business productivity.
When it comes to enterprise software, one size doesn’t fit all. No company is exactly like another, and each company needs different systems to support their unique business process. Those with the resources spend millions to try to customize with code, but this slows everything down and creates significant maintenance overhead. Writing code to customize a generic solution is expensive, inflexible, and far from optimal.
While immensely powerful, custom code solutions often introduce a plethora of recurring complexities and costs.
McElrath explained further that a failing business intelligence infrastructure can seriously stunt ROI. “Honestly, once people move to the cloud, I don’t think infrastructure is the major problem. The biggest issue with most BI tools is the lack of speed. Most of the BI platforms on the market today require a data scientist to figure out, so getting the right data into the hands of users is slow and cumbersome. Nobody wants to wait a couple weeks to find out what’s going on inside their company. They want to know right now. Until BI platforms can be used by citizen developers or an average business user, their impact will be too limited, no matter how much promise they offer. The big problem with most BI tools is very similar to the problem with other apps: if they require high-end resources and require too much time to deliver value, they will always be running behind the business instead of directing its future.”
McElrath believes one solution is the consumerization of apps because by delivering BI tools that can be used by any business person, companies can garner BI in real time, without the use of high-end resources. Artificial intelligence will help with this, but he believes the first step is to leverage the natural intelligence of the human beings we already employ. If any business user can get instant access to data and visualize it in ways that help them make better decisions right now, BI will become a consumerized app.
“I don’t believe BI as a high-end tool for measuring trailing indicators will ever go away, nor will the need for data scientists. This will be an evolution. But for most of us, right now, Skuid can provide enough real-time analysis of enough data to make a huge impact in the daily lives of a lot of people.”
When asked how Skuid is solving this problem better than any other players, McElrath explained that Skuid is founded on the belief that software should be more human and less machine—that software should work the way people work instead of forcing people to behave like machines. With Skuid, companies can join disparate data sources from nearly any enterprise software platform, quickly assemble custom applications, and deploy an engaging, easy-to-use interface on any device — all without writing a single line of code. With Skuid, people can create apps that fit the specific needs of each department and person. That is a powerful capability for companies.
Because apps built with Skuid are bespoke—made to order—they align to a user’s business needs perfectly. This means that rather than forcing a users’ business processes into an off-the-shelf enterprise software solution, Skuid users can tailor their business apps to unlimited degrees without writing code. “Because no code is required, our customers get apps to market much faster, saving money and increasing revenue. Because each app is tailored to user needs, Skuid customers have seen massive productivity gains to drive success,” says McElrath.
In addition, Skuid is unique in that it’s a system of engagement, not a system of record. Nobody really wants another new system of record, yet every app vendor seems to want you to add one to use their solution. For customers, this creates more fragmentation. Skuid does not replace your systems of record. With Skuid, you can leave your data where it rests and create unified systems of engagement.
As for the future of enterprise app development? McElrath hopes that Skuid is the beginning of the end for enterprise app development as we know it. “Today there’s a huge discrepancy between the solutions that companies want and need and the options available to them. Companies are demanding better ways to develop apps and employees are demanding that their enterprise apps be as intuitive and easy to use as the personal apps on their iPhone,” he says.
Now that the infrastructure has been simplified by the cloud, the hope is that Skuid can eliminate the need for most of the code that’s been slowing down the evolution of the user experience. Code engineers should be tackling bigger things than writing repetitive user interface and data connectivity code. Business users should be solving big problems too, but they need the apps to do it, right now.
Business and IT should be able to work together to address the needs of human beings quickly and efficiently. Instead of using software that forces people to behave like machines (or like a vendor wants them to behave), we can force our software to behave more like humans.
“I think there are opportunities to move much of the human-machine interaction away from old modalities. This should be just as true for app creation as it is for data entry. As an industry, we have a long way to go to get to true AI, but each year if we can move closer in ways that put humans at the center, rather than the technology, we can truly help everyone to thrive in the digital world,” says McElrath.