I’m not going to surprise many people by saying point solutions generally have better usability than ERP solutions. Yeah – now I’ve pissed off all the SAP and PeopleSoft users out there. If you think about an ERP, they are attempting to develop software across an enterprise primarily for users who don’t have a choice. Finance is going to use whatever they are given. So are the guys over in manufacturing and operations. If we’re in supply chain, the vendors/suppliers are definitely not going to complain about your system (generally). HR is one of the few places where the user population has other options. Managers and employees have historically been able to complete tasks through manual effort and facsimile (fax) machines. While this creates more work for HR, it’s more comfortable to the manager/employee.
Notice that I say “comfortable” and not “more efficient.” Adoption of technology doesn’t have much to do with efficiency. Instead, people want to do things that they perceive to be easier for themselves. The ERP vendors have never focused on usability – instead their mission has been increasing functionality across a huge suite of products.
Point solutions on the other hand have focused on a narrow band of processes. They have understood that these processes include practitioners, managers and employees and that the user interface and workflows impact all of the above. As such, they have spent much more time on usability. I’m not saying the functionality is lacking. It’s not. In most cases, the functionality in a point solution is far greater than an ERP because they have less ground to cover. So you got it, I’m saying that point solutions generally offer both greater functionality and usability in a single package.
Current point solutions have a clear lead in my opinion. They have the ability to achieve greater adoption rates through ease of use at the employee and manager level. They also have the ability to bring better process to bear through better functionality.
10 responses to “It’s all about the user – Part 2”
Hi Dubs,
Good post. In my experience however, point solutions have not solved the integration challenge (with or without XML). Their easier to use and they often offer better functionality but I find it is still a difficult to imbed them with the other HR solutions with the enterprise. This probably diminishes their “net” functionality.
kr,
rc
RC:
I agree that there are still major integration challenges. What’s disappointing is that the potential to solve these issues is easily within reach, but the technology adoption has been slow.
I’m waiting the the next generation of integration as more companies adopt technologies like Oracle’s Fusion middleware.
-Dubs
I empathize with you on this one, and completely agree. Being a usability professional, I see this happening a lot. Sometimes customers specifically ask for a point solution that suits their needs, allowing for a simpler and more efficient, not to mention targetted user interface.
Hemanshu: thanks for the comment, and welcome to the blogosphere.
Dubs
In my experience as a point-solution vendor (in and outside the HR vertical) the integration challenge is primarily political, not technical. When a department head buys a point solution, he’s solving a problem in his own house, and there is (often but not always) an implicit statement that this problem is more important than the “neighborhood” to extend the analogy.
When it comes time to integrate, the point-solution buyer doesn’t want to pay for it because it won’t benefit him, and the rest of the company doesn’t want to pay for it because it’s not their fault somebody bought a point system.
As for the vendor, he gets blamed for being costly to integrate, when in all likelihood the lion’s share of the cost lies with systems bought 1, 2, or 5 years ago that don’t support a simple integration path. It’s nice that your newest purchase supports XML-RPC or something, but if your other systems only deal with nightly batch files and use different and non-globally unique ID schemes, then it’s like having the world’s only fax machine.
-cwk.
Hi, Dubs:
Another challenge with point solutions is that they may look good on a singular basis or when compared to an ERP solution, but once an organization goes down that route and selects ‘best of breed’ for each function they often end up with a collection of interfaces, navigation schemes and field labels that look and behave differently. Now the poor users have a challenge in dealing with those differences and begin to clamor for a unified experience.
I agree with RC’s comments on integration. the challenges are big and the expectations are high – as a user, isn’t it reasonable to expect that if I enter education information into either recruitment, LMS, talent, performance or the HRMS that the other systems will ‘know’ about it in a reasonable time frame?
We’re thinking hard about how we can leverage web services to ease some of the pain around data movement and info delivery.
The Other Systematic
Great points on integration and point solutions. Unfortuantely you all now know where my bias lies. I agree however, that disparate systems, even tied together with synchronous API’s are still messier than an integrated ERP platform.
As systematic says, I’m a full believer in web services (see my other series right now) and a potential believer in Oracle Fusion type technologies as they get proven over the next few years.
-Dubs
[…] It?s all about the user ? Part 2 I?m not going to surprise many people by saying point solutions generally have better usability than ERP solutions. Yeah ? now I?ve pissed off all the SAP and PeopleSoft users out there. If you think about an ERP, they are attempting to develop software across an enterprise primarily for users who don?t have a choice. Finance is going to use whatever they are given. So are the guys over in manufacturing and operations. If we?re in supply chain, the vendors/suppliers are definitely not going to complain about your system (generally). HR is one of the few places where the user population has other options. Managers and employees have historically been able to complete tasks through manual effort and facsimile (fax) machines. While this creates more work for HR, it?s more comfortable to the manager/employee. (SystematicHR) […]
Sales is another area where end-users will do what they like….and of course recruiting is a subset of sales.
I think “integration” will mean different kinds of things than it does today in the next few years. As more and more larger organizations develop widespread BI competencies, managing and presenting formerly discrete data thru the ECM, Intranet, or direct database connections.
This evolution is already starting to change the meaning of the word ‘application’ as some kind of singular interface to a data resource toward a set of various means to interact with the information, much as the idea of ‘installing’ software has gone by the somewhat by the wayside as end-users no longer have a need to understand ‘where’ the software may be.
The vendor challenge will be to ensure that data models are useful and understandable to BI practitioners throughout the functional range, and of course, proprietary and locked data designs with only vendor supplied API / XML options will not be acceptable.
In fact, we think that there will be a market for solutions without any user-interface at all; just data and transactional models suited for the specific functions in question, marketed from the start right at BI teams tasked with helping end users in those areas.
[…] Make sure you understand why you’re implementing ERP. We’ve written a lot about point solutions here at systematicHR.com. There are tradeoffs whether you go with an integrated ERP, or if you go with a core HRMS plus point solutions. How you deploy specific systems and why is core to your strategy. […]