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Moving down market is tough. The reason why enterprise ecosystems can flourish is that consultants have a symbolic relationship with software, act as a silent sales force, drive legitimacy and solve the soft issues that make software projects fail. Creating a simple CRM system isn't that hard, but getting mass adoption AND offering a customizable product takes hand holding. Content alone doesn't hold hands, nor does (most) UX. Software that changes how people's jobs work (accounting, CRM, EHR, etc) naturally invites pushback because PEOPLE HATE CHANGE.

Maybe the next generation of UX will have change management built into the system, not just tours and tooltips. For now, the burden of software adoption is best served with donuts and somebody how cares enough to make it work for the business that is investing in it.




How then do you explain the sometime massively enthusiastic adoption of disruptive consumer software?

My understanding is that people seem to resist change in corporate environments because it is a high stakes environment where, for example, the ability to hold onto work "flow" achieved over a long period can make the difference between thriving and failing. Thus software becomes more of a political tool, not necessarily in the sense of office politics, but in the sense of being part of a strategic toolbox by which people grapple with the networks of power they participate in at work.

So corporate users are not necessarily resistant to change; they are just strategic about whether and what changes are to their advantage; if the introduction of new software can strengthen their work-related strategies, they can become its champions. I have seen this myself when I used to work for big multinational corporations.

To model software adoption in the corporate space, therefore, one might need to employ a theory of power such as Actor-Network theory (in which terms one might think of software as an actor that can be "enrolled" for various ends)

A theory of work and instrumentality, such as Activity Theory, is what most people (sometime without knowing it as such) apply to analyze work environments; but paradoxically it is usually the wrong approach to analysis. I see this failure of analysis all the time.

In a nutshell, the more instrumental and work-oriented software is, the more necessary it is to analyze it through a power-relations lens.




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