Process versus Practice

A former colleague of mine, Ken Norton, announced earlier this week that he is leaving Yahoo to join Jotspot as VP of Products.  I have written about Jotspot before and I think it is great that Ken will be joining that team.

In the course of his announcement, Ken made some observations that touch on some broader patterns emerging in the enterprise software business:

When I sat down with Joe to talk about JotSpot, I was a bit skeptical of serving the enterprise.  I’d sworn off enterprise software, and really wanted to keep building consumer Internet products.  What I realized is that Joe and Graham feel the same way, and that JotSpot is decidedly not an enterprise company.  My epiphany was recognizing that I don’t hate products that are used in a corporate setting.  I just hate products that aren’t built for users.  The vast majority of enterprise products are built for the people who are going to purchase, administer, configure, deploy, and provision them.  And these products are often despised by the people who ultimately do try to use them (duh).  No wonder a large percentage of enterprise software efforts go up in smoke.  The enterprise software market is broken for this reason.

And:

JotSpot also pushed some of my hot buttons around collaboration and community.  I’ve spent the better part of my career building applications that help people connect to each other and share knowledge (search is the best example of that).  I’ve always preferred solutions that let the users take charge to ones that assume an engineer knows better.  There’s something empowering about offering users a product that helps them kick ass – like the spreadsheet, the original Macintosh, desktop publishing, or the web itself.  The best products are the ones that slowly reveal complexity as you use them.

I think Ken is on to something really important here.  The primary driver behind enterprise software was efficiency and automation, removing people from business processes wherever possible and imposing standard procedures on people wherever they remained.  Business processes were the primary focus of business performance and companies generated considerable cost savings from this focus.

JSB and I have a strong sense that the focus on business performance is shifting from process to practice.  The real frontier for business performance going forward is on helping people to connect with each other and to build their capabilities more rapidly by engaging together on challenging problems and opportunities.  This will require a fundamental mindset shift on the part of executives and a different approach to technology infrastructure and tools, creating an opportunity for a new generation of products and services.  As people come back into the center of focus, enterprise software products once again will have to be built for users, rather than buyers. They will also have to focus on enhancing collaboration and community.  Ken is on to something significant here. The enterprise software game is starting to get interesting again.