What I Wish Everyone Knew About Enterprise Software

The software we all use on our desktops every day is designed with the individual in mind. But when you’re working for a business, you’re not an individual; you have to think about your team and the broader picture, and that’s why enterprise software is so important.What business practice contributed most to Andrew Carnegie’s ability to form a monopoly? Open-book management. What’s the best way for a business to increase its sales? Create an open-book culture, where employees know everything about the business’s financial health and can make informed, rational decisions.

If you treat your business like a startup, it’s going to fail, and if you treat your startup like a business, you’re going to fail. You need the right tools to succeed in business, and open-book management is the right practice. Most companies don’t realize how essential enterprise software is until they’ve already failed because they didn’t have it. In order to function properly in business today, your company needs enterprise software that lets everyone know what’s going on.

What I Wish Everyone Knew About Enterprise Software :

1. Enterprise software is not ‘administrative’.

Building a reliable and self-healing enterprise environment isn’t just a matter of deploying some servers and configuring them to run on a certain set of services, particularly if those servers are attached to an unreliable network. No, it’s much more than that. Enterprise software is built around the needs that you have as a business and your objectives for growth, not just what you want in the IT department.

2. Enterprise software is not ‘helpdesk’.

It’s true that a lot of help desk software is enterprise software, but they do very different things. Helpdesk software keeps track of the bugs that users encounter and helps customers get back to work as quickly as possible. Enterprise software helps you run your business by enabling staff to make the best possible decisions at all times. You can use help desk software to identify issues with the enterprise software, but you need enterprise software to manage your business effectively.

3. Enterprise software does not enforce culture.

A lot of enterprise software is pitched to businesses by saying that it’ll help them “force” their employees to work in a certain way, or to institute specific business practices. This isn’t what enterprise software is supposed to do. Using enterprise software, you can set up a framework to support any policy or set of policies that you want, but the policies themselves are going to come from your decision-makers and the culture of your organization, not the other way round.

4. Enterprise software is not ‘secret’.

A lot of companies think that if they roll out enterprise software successfully, everybody in the organization will just figure out how to use it and everything will be fine. Sometimes this works, but a lot of times it doesn’t, and companies need to build effective communication channels between employees — essentially a knowledge base. 

For example, if your company gets enterprise software to help you with manufacturing on-demand products, you have to make sure that everyone who’s responsible for creating those products knows how the system works. An enterprise software system can’t be used effectively unless everyone in your organization understands what it does — and why they need to use it.

5. Enterprise software is not a ‘single window’.

A lot of companies think that enterprise software is about consolidating all of the data that’s available to a business into a single interface that everyone uses. This can be a useful feature, but it’s more likely to hurt than help a company. 

Software systems are more likely to fail when they get overloaded with information, and it takes longer to get any work done on your company’s software when every task requires you to jump through hoops. The key with enterprise software is simplicity and portability — which is why so many companies choose cloud-based software over on-site solutions.

6. Enterprise software is not ‘user-friendly’.

A lot of companies think that if they install enterprise software on all of their systems, they’ll be able to provide a good user experience to every customer that comes through their door. This is rarely the case, especially with complex software, and a lot of times it’s worse than not having enterprise software at all. 

The truth is that you need support for your enterprise software in order to be successful in business. Realistically, this means investing in IT staff who are trained on how the software operates and what it can do, as well as lead user roles who know how other people will use the system and can intervene when things go awry.

7. Enterprise software is not ‘robust’.

A lot of companies think enterprise software is something that can withstand anything. They think that if they roll out enterprise software on every system, it will carry their business through every crisis and keep things running smoothly. This isn’t true — not just because of “errors in the logic” (which are to be expected in any piece of software), but also because you can’t protect yourself against everything. 

Realistically, your business has to be able to take advantage of opportunities when they arise, which is why you need a few core systems that make sense for your business and an “urgent” alert network so that people know what’s going on and where they need to be.