Over on ZDnet, Michael Krigsman made some interesting points in his blog IT Project Failures in a post entitled “Enterprise software under attack.”

He begins: “Traditional enterprise software has increasingly come under attack from cloud vendors and the general “consumerization of IT.” Both these trends signal changing expectations about the relationship between enterprise software and end users.”

“Traditional enterprise software has a negative reputation for being poorly designed and difficult to use,” he says, and it’s hard to disagree with him. Although much of his blog post deals with ERP software, the same criticisms could be made of BI software –indeed, that’s why we founded Indicee.

“Although vendors have long been aware of this problem, few genuine solutions have emerged over the years. For the most part, efforts to improve usability have been relegated to user interface projects,” Krigsman says. This is an approach that’s been called “putting lipstick on a pig.” If the underlying software is fundamentally unwieldy and incomprehensible to its users, no amount of user-interface cleanup is going to solve the problem.

Although enterprise vendors have been aware of the problem for years, they haven’t made much progress in solving it. Why is that? Krigsman has an answer, which I think is correct as far as it goes, but which only addresses one aspect of the problem.

Krigsman’s diagnosis:

“Economics and strategy lie at the heart of why traditional enterprise software is so unloved. For the most part, vendors sell these products to budget holders, who are primarily managers and executives, making end-user satisfaction a secondary consideration. When large companies buy software, selection committees focus on many factors, starting with the product’s ability to address “organizational needs.” This common approach incentivizes vendors to prioritize management goals over creating delight for end users.”

This is absolutely true. The sales process of enterprise software by its very nature makes it nearly impossible for the concerns of the ultimate users of the software to be heard. This is especially true in Business Intelligence software. Enterprise BI software is designed to please CIOs, who are looking to find software that they can use to provide information that will help their “C-Suite” peers. It’s no wonder we never see adoption rates for BI software above 20%. At Indicee, we think that approach is fundamentally wrong. True BI should be able to help virtually every knowledge worker in the organization. And in today’s knowledge economy, that means just about everybody. At Indicee we strongly believe that BI software should be designed to meet the needs of workers at every level, not just those in the executive suite.

This challenge puts enterprise BI vendors in a corner with no way out. In the first place, the very fact they are selling to management means they aren’t able to prioritize the needs of individual users. More importantly, the complexity of the traditional BI toolsets (Data Warehouses/ETL/Query Languages) drives massive projects and severely limits their ability to address smaller BI needs.

As I said in my earlier post about Indicee’s agility, our cloud-based BI engine allows Indicee’s users to grow their data spaces organically, to start with smaller projects without the armies of technical resources and grow the adoption over time.

It’s not merely that Indicee is cloud-based and thus easier to update, it’s that our software architecture is inherently flexible and our reports are designed to be shared while BI software from traditional vendors is inherently inflexible and meant for very few. Traditional BI software architecture is a straitjacket designed to fit one person: the CIO. Indicee can help the junior marketing manager and the CIO.

Quite simply, the traditional BI approach is outdated and unsuited for today’s business reality. It’s not just a pig, it’s a dinosaur. And no amount of lipstick is going to change that.