
As companies clamor for software solutions, tech companies flood them with options. In the past several years, a blizzard of software solutions has been pushed out into the market with claims of being “enterprise-ready”. These products, vendors said, would make operations tidier and employees more efficient with their rafts of capabilities and unbounded scope.
But if you talk to people in enterprises, you will hear a different story. 96% organization say they have either shelved some or all of the SaaS solutions they invested in ten years ago, according to 2017 data.
“Enterprise software has always sucked, but now people are complaining about it more,” Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress himself had said in an interview with Wired.
A possible reason behind quick abandonment of software products is many of those products bought earlier are outdated today. But many tech executives say they are stuck with new solutions they don’t know what to do with because they either do not integrate well with their current environment, or have security inadequacies which make them redundant in the era of ransomware, or their functions do not simply align with the organizational needs and wants, says Karen Lopez, project management, architect and Tech Field Day delegate.
Over her extensive 38 year-long career in tech, Lopez has worked with many companies in many roles. Since the past 3 years, she has been working at a company where she manages software acquisition, in other words, selecting, buying and implementing software solutions within the organization.
“Back during the Reagan years, when we chose software, we were buying a thing, a single thing – no matter what it was,” Lopez remembered about the simple solutions from early in her career when talking about software solutions at the Ignite Talks at the AI Field Day event in September. “Most of the software came in a box – it had media, and it was licensed.”
But software architecture and artifacts have evolved significantly since, and so has Lopez’s way of looking at products.
“I don’t care about [the components] as much because a lot of those things are more mature now than they were 38 years ago. But I put higher weight now when I’m evaluating software on all the outside-the-solution features than I ever did before,” she says.
The truth is, a software solution forged by a vendor outside the organization cannot solve all of the problems. What it should do, however, is fit in without much rework, meet a majority if not all of the objectives – and certainly not amplify any problems.
“It’s more important to me that in addition to looking at the design traits of the solution, I’m asking many more questions and hearing about how does this solution fit within our current enterprise,” she emphasizes.
A misfit or disruptive solution comes at immense cost to the organization. “If we don’t ask these questions when we’re acquiring software about its ability to fit within our existing automated continuous deployment environments, it’s going to cost us a lot more to use that solution than the value it might bring to us,” she warns.
Over the years, bad investments in software have accrued companies piling technical debt, who blame it on poor choice made by teams. It is not surprising then that the staff often discards and distances from a solution when it turns out to have usability issues.
Karen insists that the conversation during acquisition should be more around how a solution fits into the current enterprise architectural framework, and beyond. This includes the company culture, processes, governance, data quality, and how a business meets its needs.
“I want scalability and reliability at a much higher rate, than rate on evaluations that I did 10 years ago,” she says.
Additionally, instead of buying into the vendor’s spiel of “enterprise-readiness”, she says buyers must evaluate the claims with data.
A solution hastily purchased without the input of architecture and data people is a doomed investment. Lopez says that right out the gate, compatibility with modern management solutions, and risk and cost management capabilities that are the very hallmark of enterprise-readiness must be weighed and measured before green-lighting any product.
Over the past years, there has been more than 20x rise in the number of software vendors in the market followed by a 4 times increase in companies’ software budget both of which lead to significantly increased purchases.
“We need to keep thinking about how we’re going to manage and deploy and continue to keep a solution working for the business, and that’s not going to work if the software is not going to help lower the cost and risk,” Lopez concludes.