If software stands as the digital equivalent of architectural design in the corporeal world, who shoulders the responsibility for erecting digital cathedrals in the digital world?
Until the year 2020, I led a consumer life. Then work at an S&P 500 company happened. Work, something I am very passionate about. Enterprise softwares, a big corporation's necessity.
Necessities are a nuisance.
Technology is different.
Technology is one of these rare pleasant necessities in life.
At least that’s what I do believe it should be.
Then I got introduced to the world of Enterprise SaaS. Most Enterprise Software, with its cluttered interfaces and labyrinthine navigation, is an insult to art and human civilization.
Consider Salesforce, for instance. Its dashboard, though rich in features, useful, needed, often resembles a maze of data, overwhelming beginners with its complexity. You enter a pricey house and all you want is to run away. Built to never please. A constant reminder to users, that work should never be fun, nor beautiful.
Earth is beautiful, and when humans create something new, they should strive to meet Earth's standards of beauty and utility. That’s what architects and artists strived for over centuries. They strived to build utile and beautiful creations.
Yet, in the world of Enterprise Software, this ideal is often lost. Enterprise builders have sacrificed beauty for utility, without realising how lack of beauty hinders utility.
The Enterprise internet has no architects.
As a result? The Internet is an ugly place for Enterprise workers.
Since the year 2020, marked by the ascent of the COVID-19 pandemic, human’s professional existence has progressively gravitated towards the virtual world.
Subsequently, the birth of remote work is pulling an ever-increasing multitude of knowledge workers' activities from the corporeal world into the digital Enterprise world. At present, a substantial fraction of our “work” life, a third of our existence, has migrated to these novel digital constructs, to digital citadels known as Enterprise software.
Yet, if we dare to compare the architecture and design of the corporeal world with the digital Enterprise world created, what would the critic say?
It is evident that, with rare exceptions, the vast Enterprise software stands as the work of individuals who bear no semblance to architects. These builders, often characterized as "programmers," have no eyes for beauty. Driven by the rationality of structural engineering, they built what was necessary with scrappiness and no finesse.
The result: Enterprise Software is ugly.
Web applications, which serve as the host to much of our work lives, are ugly, disorganized, fractioned, burdensome. We work in ugly places.
And while the internet raum keeps expanding to host more enterprise software, which in turn hosts more time from knowledge workers’ lives, one must contemplate:
For how long can we bear the ugly visage of the digital workplace?
Where are the architects of Enterprise Software? And
Who is building the enterprise cathedrals?
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