The parallels between video games and enterprise software
Monday 19 March 2012 at 12:01 There are quite a few similarities between computer games and software designed for the enterprise. Ignoring gamification techniques where points, awards, and trophies are given for doing things, there's a lot of incidental likenesses between these two very different categories.
If it looks good it must be good
People will buy into something hyped enough even if it's duff. It it looks professional but is a bit odd or quirky, or even crashes frequently people will still want it. A slick front-end grabs attention and looks great in sales demos and makes a product stand out from the crowd. There's plenty of examples of good looking software that somehow didn't cut the mustard. The same is true of video games - folk want the shiniest graphics. I personally thought that Crysis was a mediocre game, but it did look great and sold well on that strength.
People will forgive quirks
Skyrim is a great example of a game that scored ridiculously highly in all the reviews and looks great but has tons of weirdness. The strangest thing I've seen was a mammoth that suddenly jerked 100m into the air then floated gracefully down to the ground. There's obviously bugs in the physics. There's also the 'dragons flying backwards' fiasco... it breaks the illusion of the game.
The same applies to more recent versions of Microsoft Office. The 'ribbon' Fluent User Interface is such a departure from the common Windows UI it's just odd to use and really hard to find functionality even now. It's been years since its introduction. Somehow the enterprise users tolerate this.
If it's not polished people won't buy
Games that don't quite look right or have strange design choices are not generally as popular as the more polished titles. In software, if there are no rounded corners, gradients, and attractive visual elements then it will be disregarded. The competition is so fierce and the selection is so broad that only the smartest, quickest, and boldest will survive.
The CMS market is quite indicative of this. There are hundreds of CMS systems, and literally dozens that are of a very high quality. Even narrowing it down using the development skills present in most in-house teams will yield more than a handful to choose from. The ones that seem rough in the demo & evaluation phase get dropped pretty quickly. This is multipled quite severely by the cost of implementing the solution.
A good title makes a difference
Names like Documentum, SharePoint, Office, SalesForce have an obvious link to their function. Tools that begin with a J are often Java based, which is a good thing if the customer is already using this technology. Titles that are short and easy to say on the phone work really well.
The same seems to apply to video games, but in a different way. Either it is easy to say, or it abbreviates or acronymns nicely. Examples include Call of Duty aka CoD. As with other software the title is often suggestive of what you have to do to use it - Battlefield 3 is obviously a shooter just as Photoshop is a photograph manipulation tool.
In both cases, sequels seem to do well whether its Windows 7 or Forza Motorsport 4.
People are willing to wait for a big name release
Gamers wait YEARS for the promise of certain titles. Duke Nukem Forever is a prime example of this, as is Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim which was five years in the making. It's not unusual for entertainment titles to take this long.
Conversely, professional tools don't take this long. Very few companies could afford such a long development cycle, nor would it be prudent. This market moves much faster. Google+ took just over three montths to launch business pages and during this time it was critised heavily for not having a feature present on Facebook.
People will tolerate cross platform crappiness
Some games are great on consoles and poor on the PC such as Skyrim because of the console-based UI - it was still highly ranked by reviewers and in the charts. In other cases it's the other way around; strategy games are generally regarded as better on the PC because of the mouse and keyboard but people still play them with sub-par input methods.
Enterprise software generally has two parts, the server and the client. Poor quality clients in this regard would most definitely include Outlook Web Access if you try and use it in anything other than Internet Explorer - it was terrible in Firefox or Safari because it relied heavily on ActiveX controls. Lotus webmail was just as bad.
On the server side, a lot of technologies that work very well on Linux and Unix don't funciton quite so well under Windows but many will overlook this. The differences in the file system are the usual culprit.
People will even buy gear just to run it
Crysis had extremely high video graphics power to run it properly, as does Skyrim. There are many hardcore gamers who have no problem with spending serious money just to play a game. The same applies to consoles; you have to buy the hardware to play certain games when they appear on just one machine.
SharePoint is an example of this; you need to buy Windows Server to run it if you want it in-house. Most .net software also requires capital expenditure if you want to run it properly.
The other way of course is virtualisation in the form of cloud PaaS virtual machines. These too are the equivalent of hardware leasing but with much shorter lead times - don't be fooled by the marketing. You still have to spend to make them work.
Trophies are all the rage
Ok, I did say I was going to ignore this topic, but it's just too significant in the overall scheme of this article. Gamification is the art of making work tasks into games by adding artifical rewards in order to encourage and create a competitive spirit. Plenty of in depth articles have been written about this phenomenon elsewhere on the internet. Workification is adding dull tasks into otherwise exciting games for minor rewards which can help with the main objective of the game.
Both are fairly commonplace at the moment. It seems that application designers want their tools to appeal to younger audiences who have grown up with video games, and that game developers wish their product to be accessible by more mature markets who have been ground down by the menial repetitive tasks they have to perform in their daily duty. Seriously though, I have no idea why they put a pie-making minigame into Fable 3 just to earn a few shekels.
There's only a handful of genres
Think about it: just as games can be bunched together into genres like racing, shooting, platform, puzzle so can enterprise tools. Broadly speaking, there's CMS, ECM, office packages, email, server software, backup, anti-virus, security tools. I'm not going to try and define what these categories are here (maybe another time) but there is definitely a limited number of types of enterprise software.
There's usually something bolted on that is an afterthought and doesn't quite fit
Mini-games, driving sections, and character customisations are the usual culprits in the gaming world. The enterprise market has much the same, with features that nobody really uses but are needed to tick boxes. Examples of this would include complex workflow designers, half-baked integration with analytics, and social networking & collaboration features that are half measures. Gamification done wrong is just as bad.
Something unique comes along every few years
Once every few years an innovation pops up which becomes a bandwagon that all and sundry leap upon. Titles like Grand Theft Auto really changed the landscape with the blend of violence, humour, and open game world. Business tools like LinkedIn are continuing to change HR roles. Twitter has mutated marketing, sales, and customer service by giving the consumer a voice. Facebook has hooked marketing directly into peoples daily lives. None of these were predicted, nor without hindsight were they predictable.
Both force people to do things a certain way
Although the trend is for more freedom of action, there are many activities that must be done in the prescribed manner. Just as puzzles in many games must be solved by collecting the item and taking it to location X then inserting it into slot Y to open door Z, jobs must be done by opening an application, clicking on a set of buttons in a certain order, then clicking save / done / ok to complete the task. Workflows add 'multiplayer' to the mix, making the task dependent on the actions of another 'player' and enforcing more rules. Compare this to Portal 2 which has a dual player co-operative online mode where you have to work with the other person to get the job done.
What next?
There is much that is the similar, and much that differs. The key is to try to spot the trend; what aspect of gaming will creep into the workplace next? What will migrate from the enterprise into the entertainment market?
ECM, cms, comparison, enterprise, fun, software in Enterprise, Software 