While discussing the topic of why retailers cannot keep up with their customers in terms of information and expectations – several enterprise businesses told me that the single most reason is the lack of easy & timely access to business insights! While this is the exact problem that we are trying to solve at Drastin, we observed several (not-so) interesting aspects in the journey – on how software vendors have been approaching the customer needs.
The Piecemeal Approach for Enterprise Products
Traditionally, IT-facing software vendors believed that selling to enterprises is very different from selling to consumers, due to the following differences:
- Consumer products are mostly end-to-end solutions, because the buyers are the users. For example, while selling a car, the car’s frame, engine, seats, electronics, road permit, etc. are not sold separately. They are sold together as a car to the consumer.
- In case of enterprises - only layered products are built and not solutions, because the buyers and users of the product are different. This leads to an unfortunate thinking that the buyers are more important than the users at enterprises.
This belief led them to design their software as a piece-meal approach to the enterprises, something that can be sold easily, rather than something that can be consumed as an end-to-end solution and that solves an entire use-case for the enterprise user.
The net result of this thinking, lack of design orientation and the lack of focus on user experience forced the enterprise buyers to always buy their day-to-day tools separately. Take the BI space for instance. The enterprises have to buy half-a-dozen layered products from ETL products, BI layers, reporting tools, and visualization tools – separately to fulfill their BI requirements. BI is not alone, I observed the same piecemeal approach in the infrastructure and cloud space as well, as part of my venture. Each of our pilot customers is going through the same issues in the world of decision making. In trying to design products for enterprise buyers rather than consumers, the software vendors have to face evaluation teams and lengthy approval times because of the top-down thinking of enterprises. This ultimately results in lack of attention towards developing a great solution against a great technology.
Is this an issue with the thinking, or the design, or the focus that is only on technology and not on the user?
Our Approach at Drastin
We are looking at a very different approach of providing an integrated “solution” to all customers, rather than a “technology product”. An approach that solves a use-case scenario end-to-end for an enterprise user. An approach that solves both time and cost to the enterprise user. An approach that involves giving a consumer experience to an enterprise user.
I would like to share some of our key learnings that any enterprise product can take away to create a better experience.
- Build a solution, not a product. A solution that gives an advantage in everyday work, reduces dependencies, and enables self-empowerment.
- Build something that the users would love to use, and not because it has been authorized by their boss.
- Build something that both the user and the buyer understand. Both have different dimensions to the same problem – while one may focus on the functionality and usability, the other may focus on governance, compliance, service, and TCO.
- Build something with which the user can attach emotionally and can use as an efficiency booster. The enterprise product should allow the user to see the efficiency in one’s own productivity.
- Build something that solves not only a technical problem, but also a business problem.
An enterprise product, when built as a solution and with the end-user in mind, could be a lot more complex technically but needs to focus constantly on the point of consumption, so that the user can get value out of it easily. We need to build solutions with the consumer in mind – what they want, how they want to use it, and how it fits in with their lives. It shouldn’t be the technology layers that are important. It should always be about the people who use them to derive value.
