Whether the move is from mainframes to minicomputers, or from there to personal computers and servers, and now to mobile devices and cloud computing, we are witnessing one grand process of moving machine intelligence closer to the people on the front lines, even as the computing at the center gets more powerful.
Fortunes change with each shift, as purveyors of tech stress technical knowledge when mainframes are the big thing, or talk about their understanding of business processes in the client-server era. What matters in the cloud and mobile era may be the critical importance of design. With all the data being collected, design and the ability to present information well may be the big strategic weapon.
It certainly seems to be the way a lot of people are coming after the incumbents. Recently Infor, a collection of revamped business applications companies, unveiled a good-looking set of charts, graphics and lists that inform much of the output and future options on its mobile applications for manufacturing and sales.
On Wednesday, a start-up called Tidemark, which sells cloud-based business analytics software, introduced a series of planning features, called storylines, that are designed to speed forecasting and decision making. Areas like profitability of regions and products, or the effects on costs of changing headcount, are displayed graphically, in what feels like a consumer Web site on which you can redesign images with your browser.
“The point is to let the business customer configure the product; when you democratize information with technology, you also make it actionable,†says Christian Gheorghe, founder and chief executive of Tidemark. “Older business analytics projects failed 80 percent of the time, because they reflected business activity that was out of date.â€
Tidemark, which has some 14 large businesses as clients, each of which has about 100 people using the software, is keen to add its appeal and ease of use. It is also announcing a closer business relationship with Workday, a cloud-based provider of financial software. Tidemark’s storylines center mostly on financial information, so the Workday alliance is a natural fit for both companies.
Win or lose, Tidemark’s move underlines how important it has become for companies that use consumer devices, and working in a cloud-computing environment that gives everyone access to a lot of data and processing power.
From mainframes on, with every generation it got cheaper to own a computer, and thus easier to share work among a greater number of people and departments. For the most part, however, the efforts have been overseen by relatively few information technology professionals, who were trained in, and comfortable with, the use of command lines, columns, and spreadsheets.
The big change now is not that everyone is an I.T. manager - there are still plenty of ways companies will control devices, access to computers, and data - but that everyone is a consumer of a lot of data. Making that easy on them will most likely be a winning strategy.
“There has been a revolution in design theory,†says Phil Libin, chief executive of Evernote, a storage site for consumers and businesses. “We’ve all had to learn how to have taste.†He credits the change toward a design focus, in both consumer electronics and enterprise software, to Apple. Around 2008, with the iPhone beating longtime incumbents in the phone business, he says, “Apple taught us all that design language could win. From then on we all had to build it into the product.â€
That is significantly harder than it sounds. It is tough for incumbent companies accustomed to selling products that emphasize complexity, something that until recently was a point of pride and indicated that a lot of engineers had slaved on this product. It is tough for start-ups too, however, as they try to sell to I.T. staffs that are wary of products that look like they came from the App Store.
The trick, for Mr. Gheorghe and others, will be in making something delightful that the financial and I.T. gatekeepers let into the hands of people in other departments. It may also mean a growing market in designers in all sorts of new places.
