Usability of ITSM Software: Stuck in the 80’s

I attended Pink Elephant's conference in Vegas last week.  One of the more interesting sessions was a vertical user group meeting.  This was a facilitated event where the users drove the topics and the conversations.  Usability– to my surprise and pleasure – was a hot topic. I mean, hot as in people got pretty heated about the lack of usability in their ITSM software and help desk products.

Some of the comments heard were:

• "It's all from the same company, but it doesn't even look the same."
• "The modules don't talk to each other"
• "It takes 10 consoles to do a basic function"

And on and on. I am a big fan of usable software and have spent many hours worrying newScale User Interface engineers about 1 pixel differences and screen flows.

So there I was listening from the back.  Then someone said, "Hey, we have a vendor here! Let's ask him."  Now, none of these nice people were my customers, and somehow I must answer for all the sins of the vendors they've chosen. As Borat would say, "Great success!!" So here is what I said: 

Most Request for Proposal (RFP's) are feature and function driven. There are two problems with this approach.

One, when you break down a product that way, it has the effect of making all the products look similar (that's part of the purpose of the RFP as it enables a price negotiation).  But think about it:  a chimp and a human being are 95% the same, but that 5% makes a big difference.   That 5% is usability

Second, important usability engineering , information architecture and aesthetic principles  of industrial design are not made requirements or conveyable in a grid type evaluation.   They could be, but with two exceptions, they are not.

At that moment, I became possessed by the Imp of the Perverse, and I continued.

If you really want to ruin  a software vendor's day, ask for a Proof of Concept on usability and make that test part of the RFP. That's the only way that you will change vendor attitudes to usability.  It's happened in the consumer space. Apple's iPod is a more usable product than the competitors, so every vendor there is scrambling to make their products easier to use and more compelling.  The same thing needs to be done for ITSM software.

Why bring this up for service catalogs?  Because with a user-facing catalog, you only get one chance to do this well.  Neither business executives nor users work for IT. You can't make them do what they don't want to. If the catalog is not usable it will not get adoption.  It will be like having an e-commerce portal without sales.

Unless usability is made part of the evaluation, I would have a significant concern over the potential of a failed project, the ability to deliver, time to production, ease of operation and administration, and cost of ownership. 

So my marketing and sales folks may not like my answer, but  I don't see how to make usability a priority, if you, the customer, don't.

Until then, most ITSM software is client-server code from the 80's. 

The BIG 4:  Is your IT software stuck in the 80's?