Good Training, Bad Software

Here’s a good rule of thumb for people thinking about buying a piece of technology: the more training it takes to use it, the worse it is. And by “worse” I mean you will be saying “This stinks!” within a month of implementation.

It’s a handy reference for understanding why some CIO’s seem so disconnected from the world of the average user. The software they install and manage takes a lot of training to use. Ever tried to create a employee record in PeopleSoft? How about a GL entry in Oracle. Not possible to do without a week of training. Its job security for the user and the purchaser.

It’s also the main reason that the large ERP vendors will never, ever be good at recruiting and talent software. Their entire business model is based on the assumption that they can get their customers to spend lots of money to train people to use their software. Good recruiting software only succeeds when any untrained and unenthusiastic user (the Invisible 80) user can get value from it without a lot of training. Ergo, ERP never going to be a player. New ERP may come up and change that (here’s hoping Dave gets it right).

Of course that means that the Innovator’s Dilemma is about to smack most of the big ATS players right in the face: they have been building software for the Power 10, because that’s the best way to close sales in the present software environment. Unfortunately, once the metric becomes usability, most ATS will be DOA.

Here’s a corollary to the rule of thumb listed above: the more disconnected from the problem the user of software is, the more training it will take to use that software. So if a person is experiencing a problem and needs to solve it and uses software to do so, then it will likely be simple. If, on the other hand, the problem is “someone else’s” then the software will be difficult to use.

Which is to say: the more expensive the software, the less valuable. (This is only partially true right now, but will be increasingly so over the next decade.)

The final thing to realize is: if your job is to make sure you have a job, then spending a lot on software is a good way to succeed.

Comments

[nightMair]

I agree wholeheartedly, at the end of the day CRM, ERP and ATS Apps still aim at pleasing the buyer (for obvious reasons of the sale) but at the end of the day forget to target the user and all of the metrics and reports that the buyer buys in for in the first place become garbage.
S

[John Sumser]

Interesting posture for the ex-honcho of Intellimatch. I, of course, beg to differ strongly.

Software is dead and not poised for a second coming. It has become a medium precisely for the reasons you outline. The ERP vendors did not make bad software, they just discovered the limits of the applicability of automation.

Software supports and facillitates processes in an organization. To expect it to automate and simplify transactions that are all individual and unique is to expect that it can perform beyond its abilities.

Service delivered as an adjunct to a software platform is a good thing, the wave of the future, and the consequence of the automating we've done to date.

We should tear into this argument, Jeff. It's good and polar.

The blog seems to be coming along well.