Let’s see if this situation sounds familiar. Your company is adopting a new-fangled enterprise software platform – announcements have gone out, the implementation team has been identified, had their proper kickoff, and some serious changes are in the works. Sure, the software is pricey, but just look at all those features! If even half of them work as well as the salesman said it would, it will be revolutionary.
But there’s a significant obstacle to overcome; there’s a legacy system to replace. Maybe it’s an ancient version of the new product, maybe it’s a perplexing labyrinth of home grown point solutions overgrowing the back forty, maybe it’s a little hamster running on a wheel duct taped to a file server. So yes, it’s occasionally slow, the one guy who knows how it all works is about to retire, and it blows up every second Tuesday. But apart from those minor inconveniences, the thing works. Not to mention people are really, really used to the old system because it’s been there forever. Forever.
For some time, small-to-medium business (SMB)* has been largely underserved by solutions in the Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) space among other enterprise applications. Small business needs are increasingly compact and agile, aspects for which enterprise software continues to struggle mightily. Mobile technology is on fire, and some small business are pushing as much of their business into the mobile space where compactness and agility is in laser focus. While one can correctly argue that many of these mobile apps will run into some serious trouble as the business scales in size, the truth is businesses are not looking for the right solutions necessarily, but what works right now. This is not carelessness, but attribution to the fact that small business must live and die in the moment; survival to fight another day is paramount.
The bitter truth has been repeatedly blogged, tweeted, scrawled on walls, and -especially- shouted from the tops of nearby trees: Enterprise software UI just plain sucks. Not a casually annoying, I-wish-that-was-more-convenient letdown, but rather a sustained soul-stealing, product-of-your-worst-nightmares catastrophe. You’ll find quite a bit of intelligent conversation around the blogosphere on this topic including 
It is the dawn of the Third Age of PLM. PLM is at a crossroads, and perhaps more alarmingly a precipice. Long enough have we stood upon the accomplishments of the First and Second Ages – if nothing new is to come, then PLM stands to be forgotten in the land of IT, where the shadows lie.