Dave Duffield and Bob Barker: Separated at birth?

The great Bob Barker and the great Dave Duffield: separated at birth? You be the judge ...

Advice for CEOs

I feel very honored to be a member of the Enterprise Irregulars group - a very plugged group of people, with lots of hands-on knowledge and experience. I asked them what advice they'd like to give to enterprise solutions company CEO's, and I got the following fascinating list of suggestions.

Carol Bartz

• Ya gotta know when to fold 'em, sometimes even the best poker players come up with a deuce/three offsuit.

Dave Duffield

• Keep control. No more "got the moves" CEOs.

Eric Schmidt

• Don't lose your newfound cash flow and cost cutting religion just because the needle is moving up and to the right again.
• Enjoy. Really. Cut some costs if you can. Its all good.
• Experiments are fun, but you are a one trick pony and don't have the same power to monopolize that market the way Microsoft did. Ad-supported revenue will die, so cannibalize yourself and diversify with meaningful revenue streams before someone else does it for you.

Jeff Bezos

• Have a chat with Larry & Bill. See who wants to find the next greatest CEO for their company. Spin out retail under Zappos guy or someone else. And go be a computer industry God by continuing to simultaneously kick some serious butt - you are the only one who can take on Google (see Google Products & Checkout) and Apple (see music/books/devices) and stand your ground.
• Keep on keepin on, no one does it better.
• Love what you're doing with cloud computing, but 2010 might be the year to spin it off and let it go its own way.

John Chambers

• Pay a dividend, recognize you're an awesome cash flow machine that's only going to grow via acquisitions.
• You got game - keep delivering on Telepresence and revolutionalize the data center.

Karl and Pam Lopker

• Talk to Vivek and follow the same advice.

Larry Ellison

• IBM's multi-billion dollar mainframe business is ripe for the plucking with some juicy margins. Sell non-core Sun businesses, and do your magic. Your stock will be $30 before end of next year.
• There's blood in the water, don't let up and keep pressing.
• Your consolidation call was timely, and unbelievably effectively done, but 2010 is the year to take Oracle back to a path of innovation. Stop focusing so much on cost-cutting, and unleash some entrepreneurialism within Oracle to drive it to a $300B market cap.

Lars Dalgaard

• While you still can, and the Street hasn't figured you out, use your ridiculously lofty valuation and goodwill to acquire the technology edge you don't have but many think you do.
  

Leo Apotheker

• Take solace in the fact you got a chance to be CEO, most don't.
• SAP could be a platform for business efficiency - think about providing services that are not software-oriented in 2010. How about doing (across multiple SAP customers) supplier scoring, credit rating, and other benchmarking offerings?

Marc Benioff

• Religion only takes you so far, sell to Oracle now while you can.
• Keep it up - you're doing great!

Mark Hurd

• Call it a career, before HP starts trying to win (and fails) against the big boys. Oracle still has the valuation and capital to make it happen.

Sam Palmisano

• Buy SAP while people still think it's a premium asset.

Steve Ballmer

• Hire Jeff Bezos as your replacement by acquiring AWS for a ridiculous sum.
• Keep up your fiscal discipline, break the company apart, and DON'T go acquisition crazy
• Time to retire.

Steve Jobs

• Keep those doctors on retainer, at least until the tablet revolutionizes home entertainment a la the iPhone has done with mobile computing.

Steve Singh

• Keep it up, you've got the magic and don't need to sell.and don't be afraid of an aggressive acquisition spree.

Vivek Randive

• If you get a legit offer, don't be too proud, sell and move on.

Zach Nelson

• The sooner you're honest with yourself about what your company is and can be, the sooner the market will treat you with a modicum of respect.

Lots of great advice there from some really smart, experienced people. If you have any to add, just put in your comment below or at http://dbmoore.blogspot.com/. Thanks!

Usability in enterprise Apps: Workday 9

Usability in Enterprise Applications

I recently saw a video of Workday 9, and was not impressed with the apparent usability of one of the highly touted features of this release. I tweeted my impression, and got a quick and friendly response from the team at Workday. They didn't complain about my bias or lack of information. Instead, as a great company should, they opened up and accepted the feedback. They offered me (and some Enterprise Irregulars colleagues) a briefing on Workday 9, to bring us up to speed and to get more feedback from us. My comments that follow are based on this briefing.

A Little Background

Workday is a company started by Peoplesoft's founder and some key Peoplesoft employees. Peoplesoft was a ground-breaking company in many ways, and the founders and employees of Workday clearly intend to surpass their previous accomplishments with this new venture. Peoplesoft strove to change the way employers engaged with employees, and they practiced what they preached in their own company.

Workday's product is based on modern technologies, including services-oriented architecture (SOA), Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) delivery model, and Adobe Flex for a rich Internet experience.

The Wheel

My initial critique was based on a feature of Workday 9 called "The Wheel." At least, that's how I had seen it named in a number of blogs and news stories. Essentially, "The Wheel" is the "home page" for users of Workday 9. Here is a picture of "The Wheel."

Many modern applications have adopted a horizontal "tab strip" approach, where each tab represents a type of activity. Clicking on a tab typically brings up a screen with tasks related to the selected activity across the top just below the tab strip, with additional navigation or activities in a panel on the left (or right) of the screen, and with a large, rectangular workspace to the right (or left) of the navigation panel.

This "horizontal tab strip" approach is frequently used because it offers a very straightforward information architecture, and users can quickly and easily become (and remain) productive. This "L-shaped" layout pattern is used in business and consumer applications, including both browser-based and native client applications. Examples of web sites using this pattern in the consumer space include Blogger and Facebook, both with some variations on the theme. In the enterprise world, most portal-style applications use some variation on this pattern - an example from Salesforce.com is also shown here.

Unlike this familiar horizontal layout for the top level navigation, The Wheel is a role-based, circular menu. Activities are represented by icons around the edge of a circle (or ellipse, depending on your window size or aspect ratio). One benefit of an approach like The Wheel is that the user can see more options on one screen than with a horizontal layout. However, "more" is not always equivalent to "better." In this case, having watched the demo, I remain convinced that The Wheel is not an improvement in usability over a tab strip. The drawbacks of The Wheel, from my limited research and discussions with colleagues:

• The Wheel makes it hard to predictably navigate to any particular activity. Humans navigate, particularly on computers, more easily in straight lines than in curves or circles. With a horizontal tab strip, you just keep moving to the right until you find your tab. With today's high resolution and wide-screen displays, this approach can include many tabs! With The Wheel, you'd have to move your mouse or trackball in a circular motion as you browse, and that is a harder motion to make (especially on my cluttered desk).
  
• The Wheel may introduce significant usability problems for users when one or more new options are added to The Wheel, or taken away. All the learned muscle movements will have to be unlearned, because any change in the number of options will result in a new orientation for the other icons. This would not be the case in a tab strip, where you might go further or less far, but you at least don't have to change directions.
• The Wheel uses a lot of screen space for a little functionality. The area between the window's enclosing rectangle and The Wheel - this space is wasted. Similarly, the workspace created inside the wheel also wastes the space between the inscribed rectangle and the enclosing ellipse.

Workday 9 Delivers Great Usability

That said, Workday 9 has delivered some great usability in virtually every other area I saw in the product.

When the user's mouse "hovers" over an icon on the wheel, a window pops up in the center (see the "Inbox" rectangle inside The Wheel in the Workday 9 screen shot above). This working space comes up remarkably quickly, and contains all the tasks and context needed for the user to be productive. This is great design. The same effect could have been accomplished without the ellipsoid Wheel, but enough on that topic!

Throughout the product, whenever the user is looking at data that can be linked to more detail, the data is a link the user can click to directly navigate to that detail. When looking at an employee in a report, the user can click on the employee's name and navigate to the information in the system this user can see about that employee, along with all the tasks this user can perform on that employee's information, such as giving that employee a raise or updating that employee's skills in the skills database. In the Projects screen shot shown here, you can see that each project name, the project owner, the project category, and even the number of employees working on the project are all links; clicking on the link navigates to the sensible destination to get more data, whether it is the details of the project, or the list of the employees working on the project.

Whenever the user is looking at a table of data in Workday 9, the user can export that data to Excel, sort, filter, and perform other operations on the data. This is extremely useful for status reporting, embedding in presentations, doing "what-if" analysis, and just making the system pleasant to use.

Summary

There are many other examples of great design in the user interface Workday 9. The visual design is good - appealing, speedy, and clear. The information architecture is well thought-out - goal-oriented, providing a reasonable set of appropriate options, and easily learned. The interaction design allows for a high degree of productivity.

A well-designed enterprise application speeds adoption, encourages frequent use, engenders better results with more use by individuals and by the enterprise, and eases the accomplishment of the system's goals. Usability is a key element of good design (along with good functional design), and usability is a quality frequently all too lacking in enterprise software.

Overall, Workday 9 is a great example of a design that is centered on making people very productive in getting work done - exactly what you'd expect from the crew at Workday. Congratulations! My hat is off to you - you've set a bar that will be hard for other enterprise software to exceed (but I plan to do so with my team at C3!).

Disclosures

• I do not work for Workday
• I do not take any money from Workday
• My blog is not ad supported, and contains no ads from Workday
• I do not work for any Workday competitor
• I do not take any money from any Workday competitor
• My blog is not ad supported, and contains no ads from Workday competitors
• I have worked for at least two Workday competitors in the past (SAP and Oracle)
• I admire great design, especially relating to usability, comprehensibility, and user productivity
• I do not now use nor have I ever used Workday software, so my knowledge about Workday's usability, especially prior to the Workday briefing, was admittedly very light
• I am not a user experience expert, just an interested novice