Software vendors, to be sure, have historically attempted to keep up with ever-shifting trends in user-interface technology and fashion. In the 1990s, when Microsoft Windows and client-server technologies brought rich, graphical clients to the desktop, most enterprise and manufacturing software vendors traded in their traditional text-heavy green screen UIs. A decade later, with the rise of the Web, vendors dumped client-server in favor of simplified browser-based interfaces. And, more recently, the trend has been toward richer Web-based interfaces and portals.

Through all those changes, however, one reality has persisted: enterprise applications and much plant floor software have remained difficult to use, requiring loads of end-user training.

"They just aren't very flexible, and most employees would rather not use them if they had a choice," says Jim Cebula, global director of purchasing at Kennametal Inc., which has shifted indirect material procurement to an on-demand service from Ketera Technologies, Inc., in part to improve ease of use, drive broader usage, and, ultimately, gain greater control of procurement spending.

There are several reasons much enterprise software remains relatively user unfriendly. For one thing, experts say, despite all the graphical lipstick applied by vendors, most enterprise system screens still closely reflect the internal logic of the applications. And, since the logic that drives most enterprise applications is still heavily data-oriented — as opposed to process-oriented — most enterprise applications tend to present information in tabular form. So, for example, a manufacturing user interested in accessing the performance history of a piece of equipment would be presented with a table of machine events rather than a more familiar image such as a representation of a control room with dials and pictures of machines.

Also forcing UIs toward the drab and difficult-to-use is the fact that, even as the functionality of enterprise applications and the variety of users have expanded, most vendors have taken a one-size-fits-all approach to UI design.

"What you end up with is a lowest-common-denominator approach," says Jim Shepherd, senior vice president at AMR. "As a vendor, you end up making compromises with the UI to deal with all aspects of the job, and you don't provide a great user experience for any of them."

On top of that, experts say, vendors have been reluctant to spend lots of resources — and CPU cycles — on fancy user interfaces for fear that doing so would bog down overall system performance.

Finally, many vendors have been hesitant to tackle a head-to-toe UI makeover because of the sheer size of the task. "We have 7,000 screens already defined for our application," says Dan Matthews, chief technology officer at ERP vendor IFS. "We're not in a position to rewrite all of those, nor would all of our customers want us to."

Still, despite all of those hurdles, vendors of enterprise and plant systems are beginning to respond to customer demands for easier-to-use applications. The most obvious and widespread trend in enterprise software usability is the movement among many vendors to employ familiar desktop applications such as Microsoft Outlook, Excel, and Word as user-friendly front-ends. The idea is to provide to casual or occasional users of enterprise systems a familiar, accessible face with which they can comfortably access secure enterprise processes and data.

Not surprisingly, Microsoft itself has led the way in this regard, integrating the Outlook look and feel directly into the latest releases of its Dynamics family of applications, including Dynamics AX and Dynamics CRM.