Oracle Feeling Social???

I've just read an interesting article written by Paul McDougall over at Information Week that ties in very nicely to the Web2.0 conference Oracle hosted in Melbourne and Sydney during April 2008. In his article, Paul discusses our efforts to develop applications that 'look and feel like the Web 2.0 services that are dominating the consumer world..'.

We presented some of the new CRM features that hook into the new world of social-networking sites like LinkedIn et al. allowing our products and solutions to leverage environments where our customer contacts maintain their personal details, job roles etc.

Software vendors like Oracle are looking at new ways that their products can be more easily adopted by a companies workforce and presenting an interface that smells like FaceBook has its obvious benefits. The workforce of tomorrow will have been brought up with access to the internet and with experience in using applications that are both functional and funky at the same time. Tomorrow's world will not have too much room for stuffy and uptight applications that enforce a particular Germanic mode of operation - the troops will surely rebel!

As I frequently tell audiences, I've been around this industry for more than 20 years now and have been involved in software-product implementations around the world. The main reason for a 'failed' implementation is a negative response by users of the system that you are responsible for implementing to supposedly 'help' them in their daily-activities. Providing an environment that users actually want should 'almost' guarantees success?

The main reason that God was able to create the earth within a week is because he didn't have to go through UAT!

Paul