The Applicator

In the last few posts, I’ve been talking about “brittle” applications, applications that just don’t work unless everything goes right. We all know lots of analogues for these apps in other areas: the Ferrari that coughs and chokes if it’s not tuned once a week or the souffle that falls if you just look at it funny. But it doesn’t occur to most people that many, if not most enterprise applications fall into the same category.

They don’t realize, that is, that ordinary, run of the mill, plain-vanilla enterprise apps are kind of like Ferraris: it takes a lot to get them to do what they’re supposed to do.

Here are some examples.

Consider, for instance, the homely CRM application. Many, if not most executive users go to the trouble of buying and putting one in because they want the system to give them an actionable view of the pipeline. Valuable stuff, if you can get it. When the pipeline is down, you can lay people off or try new marketing campaigns. When it’s up, you can redeploy resources.

Unfortunately, though, it takes a lot to get a CRM system to do this. If, for instance, the pipeline data is inaccurate, it won’t be actionable. Say a mere 10% of the salesforce is so good or so recalcitrant that their pipeline data just can’t be trusted. You just won’t be able to use your system for that purpose.

It’s kind of funny, really. Giving you actionable pipeline data is a huge selling point for these CRM systems. But when was the last time you personally encountered one that was 90% accurate.

Another example I ran into recently was workforce scheduling in retail. A lot of retailers buy these things. But it’s clear from looking at them that the scheduling can be very easily blown.

Finally, take the example I talked about before, MRP. When you run that calculation, you have to get all the data right, or the MRP calculation can’t help you be responsive to demand. If even 30% of the lead times are off, you won’t be able to trust much of the run. And when was the last time more than 70% of the lead times were right.

Notice that if you underutilize a brittle system, it can be somewhat serviceable. If you use the CRM system to follow the performance of the salespeople who use it and don’t try to use the totals, the inaccuracy doesn’t matter. If you just use MRP to generate purchase requisitions, the lead times don’t matter. But, as I said in the earlier post, if you do underutilize the system, the amount of the benefit available falls precipitously. And then the whole business case that justified this purchase and all this effort just crumples.

What makes me think that a lot of enterprise applications are brittle? Well, I have a lot of practical, personal experience. But setting that to one side, it’s always seemed to me that the notion of brittle application explains a lot of data that is otherwise very puzzling.

Take for instance all the stuff that Michael Krigsman tells us about project failures. He is constantly reminding us that the cause of failure is a three-legged stool, that it could be the vendor or the consultant or the company, and he is surely right. What ought to be puzzling about this, though, is why there is no redundancy, why the efforts of one group can’t be redoubled to make up for failings in another. If the apps themselves are brittle, however, it takes all three groups working at full capacity to make the project work.

Or, more generally, look at the huge number of project failures (what’s the number, 40%, are abandoned?). Given how embarrassing and awful it is to throw away the kind of money that enterprise app projects take, you’d think that most people would declare some level of victory and go home, unless the benefit they actually got was so far from what they were hoping for that the whole effort became pointless.

How can you tell whether the enterprise app you’re looking at is brittle? Well, look at the failure rate. If companies in your industry historically report a lot of trouble getting these things to work, or if the “reference” installations that you look at have a hard time explaining how they’re getting the benefits that the salesman is promising you, it’s probably a brittle app.

Two questions remain. When do you want to bite the bullet and put in a brittle app? And why would vendors create apps that are intrinsically brittle?

Next post.