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By far the single most important factor when deploying an enterprise app is to make sure the user interface is intuitive and easy to use, according to a QuinStreet survey of IT and business professionals released Feb. 10. QuinStreet is the publisher of eWeek.
Ease of use is the most important factor for 83 percent of enterprise app users, while 75 percent rank easy implementation as their top usage criterion. If an app is not easy to use, people will avoid it — and all the functionality that went into it will have gone for naught.
On the app deployment front, IT managers are at an important crossroads when it comes to making decisions on key internal and customer- and partner-facing applications. With so many newer deployment choices — public, private, hybrid and multi-cloud systems — to add to conventional servers and storage in data centers, IT decision-makers have to do a lot of extra homework to determine which approach and subsequent components will work best for their businesses.
The survey results indicate that new enterprise applications, especially those for big data and mobile device management, are more likely to be deployed in the cloud than are established enterprise applications, such as finance/accounting, human resources, and governance, risk, and compliance.
Regulatory issues are a key determining factor in the adoption of cloud apps, the survey found. Government, insurance, health care and scientific research organizations are going to be slower movers to SaaS applications, because security and industry regulations for these industries often require personal data to be retained in on-site servers and storage.
Government Is Behind in SaaS Adoption
In the health care and finance industries, about one-quarter of the survey respondents are currently using cloud-based enterprise applications, the survey found. While current use in the government sector is less popular, that sector reports serious interest in migrating to the cloud in the coming years.
Other key data points from the survey, entitled “2015 Enterprise Outlook: To SaaS, or Not to SaaS”, include:
–Only 42.7 percent of survey respondents currently are running an enterprise mobile device management application, but more than half of them are using the cloud.
–Small businesses are less likely to turn to cloud-based applications than medium-size and large organizations. Less than two-thirds of respondents from small companies (fewer 100 employees) are using or plan to use cloud-based enterprise applications.
–Finance/accounting applications are the most popular installed enterprise software applications across company sizes. Outside of marketing/sales and finance/accounting applications, there is a fairly wide disparity in installed applications by company size.
–The U.S. government lags behind industries such as health care and finance in terms of adopting cloud-based enterprise applications. In 2010 the federal government issued its Cloud First mandate to federal agencies, but four years later, survey respondents from government report that their efforts generally remain in the planning stage. On average, 56 percent of government sector respondents don’t use enterprise cloud apps or don’t have plans to migrate to the cloud.
–In both the banking and health care sectors, approximately 25 percent of the respondents are currently using cloud-based enterprise applications.
You can view a slideshow of highlights on Baseline here.
Finally, QuinStreet hosted a Google Chat session with editors from Baseline, CIO Insight, EnterpriseAppsToday, Datamation and eWEEK recently on this topic. Valuable insights and market metrics were discussed.