thoughts on business, service and technology operations and management
Random header image... Refresh for more!

Conumer Reporting Interfaces Better than $$$ Business App Interfaces

by doug

The folks over at Juice Analytics have some good points on how many of the consumer focused application user interfaces just make more sense than most of the very expensive business application interfaces. They tend to help the consumer “get” the message and meaning better.

Is this where we need some sort of Web2.0 revolution in the vendor community? Do we (vendors) do a good enough job beginning with the end in mind? I’m sure we have all kinds of usability, UI and reporting type groups involved in developing our products, but what about really sitting with our customers to make sure we’re not overcomplicating things or swamping them with unnecessary features and functionality that can to distract from productivity and product value.

Or is this an opportunity for an entirely new company/product to emerge - one that creates a wiz-bang Web2.0 type federated application that sits on top of all the expensive business and IT solutions and technology and presents easy to consume user interfaces, reports, portals, etc.?

Is this a Web2.0 CMDB? ERP for IT? BSM 2.0?

License

This work is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

3 comments

1 El Ruso » Fun interface to boring data as a business? { 06.01.06 at 4:52 pm }

[...] Doug McClure wonders whether this represents an underserved business niche for some new start-up explore. I’d say hell, yes! [...]

2 El Ruso { 06.01.06 at 4:52 pm }

Fun interface to boring data as a business?…

Juice Analytics has a great post about huge gap in quality and ease-of-use between consumer-oriented reporting interfaces and those typically found in enterprise software. Zach makes the point that the enterprise reporting, besides coming last in the d…

3 doug { 06.01.06 at 5:23 pm }

Thanks for the comments Evgueni. I also wonder what such a start-up would look like.

Would it be a company that focuses on the UI? (Reporting/Portal 2.0) Analytics and meaning? (BI 2.0) Integration and consolidation of data (EAI/ETL 2.0?).

(I know, shame on me for using the 2.0 thing here…)

If we mashed those all together what would we get? Would it be valuable? Useful? Web-enabled, WYSIWYG, Ajaxy, portable, platform independant? Smooth, sleek and sexy?

Hmm…

Doug

Leave a Comment