The businesses of today are the innovators of tomorrow when it comes to software usability.  If you ask a typical business owner (and we have) about software, they will tell you that they don’t care too much about the thousands of features it has.  What they care about is that it does the job they need it for and its cost effective.  This sounds really simple…and obvious.  What business owner would want to spend money on software that doesn’t do the job they need it to?   Well, surprisingly, a lot of business owners!

Then we asked the question “Why would you purchase software that doesn’t perform the job you need it to?”, we had a disturbing revelation.  “Because I couldn’t find anything better.” they said.

Now before we go any further, we must put this in the proper context.  We conducted this survey of 100 business owners in our local area and and asked  a series of questions about how they managed ‘knowledge’ within their companies.  We were interested in finding out how the day-to-day operations and interactions of the business generated information and where that information was being kept.  Information such as customer correspondence, project status updates, orders, customer issues, daily revenue, and crisis situations.

As it turns out, a lot of this information was stored in e-mail and MS Word documents.  Many of the businesses we surveyed didn’t even have an office network so other employees could access these documents.  Almost no one had a ‘search’ feature implemented for people to find information and all of them used e-mail to store critical information about everything.

This was not surprising, as we had already read about this phenomenon in a myriad of blogs and articles online but we wanted to see first hand how these businesses perceived this problem.  Many of them didn’t even think it was a problem.  They are so entrenched in doing business this way, they were unable to see anything better!