In a recent post, Zeus Kerravala asks, "Is it Time for the Enterprization of the Consumer?" The basic idea is that it's time for enterprise products to be as easy to use as consumer products are; and that if this design goal is achieved, enterprise users may actually prove willing to bring their work devices into their personal lives.
During our Enterprise Connect road shows this spring, Kevin Kieller routinely made a roughly opposite point. He encouraged the audience to reject the notion that users should be able to adopt and use new UC products without the need for training or instruction manuals--as they've come to expect from consumer products. His reasoning: There's less at stake with a consumer device/application. If the user doesn't derive all the available functionality from the product, they can still be a satisfied customer, as long as they're getting enough of what they want. But in the enterprise world, you buy and provision devices and applications with specific goals and results in mind. If the user can't use the devices to achieve these results, you're not getting the full value of the investment.
Advocates of consumerization would probably argue that Kevin's setting up a false choice: Is it really impossible to design enterprise devices and applications such that a person can get the full value without needing training in how best to use the product?
Zeus takes this notion a step farther, arguing that not only is it possible to develop such products for the enterprise, but that if the product is inherently a high-end device--like the Cisco video stations he cites--enterprise users will not only adopt the device, but will consider it a perk to be issued something that they probably couldn't justify buying on their own, as a consumer product.
I hate to hedge, but I think both of them have reasonable points. I'm a little skeptical that there will ever be more than a few enterprise products that truly have the kind of "wow" factor that Zeus talks about--"wow" just isn't as high a priority in the working world. More importantly, a lot more aggregate energy and creativity are put into the consumer electronics industry's ongoing drive for more engaging interfaces and devices. The enterprise vendors simply can't compete.
However, Kevin is right that even well-made enterprise products may need some help to maximize adoption and use. And Lync--which was the topic of the EC road show--is a good example.
As a Lync user, I can attest that it's pretty easy to figure out and use. Having run many breakout sessions on Lync at our various shows, we've heard enterprise people sing its praises as a user tool. And yet users clearly aren't getting all they could from Lync--or else there wouldn't be all this talk about training.
Like so many other applications, communications tools--whether Lync or its many competitors--have become easy to get the basic functionality out of. But to get your users to take advantage of all the potential benefits of the tool, you may need to do some nurturing. That's true whether you're talking about a UC client, a CRM application, or something you developed in-house.
In this respect, communications has become what they always said it would be: Just another application on the network.
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