This week I’ll be profiling a few of the people attending Jive’s Enterprise UI Summit, which is Thursday & Friday in Aspen.

What are you currently focused on at SAP?

Running a 180 person UX team located in 8 different countries.  Defining the strategy and leading the execution of a whole new generation of experience design for SAP.

Is there such thing as an Enterprise User Interface? What does it mean to you?

From a user experience perspective I am not sure there is “enterprise software” as much as there are “enterprise requirements.”  Sometime you can use existing design patterns and sometimes you need a different solution.  However when your product has to run concurrently in 30 different languages with 5,000 users connected at a time and know the tax and HR law in every country on the planet before the user can click on the SAVE button this is not what teams are designing for.

What makes a good UI?

Balance.  Balance between interaction, the appropriate content/function and speed to let people get their work done and then get back to their lives.

What are some examples of good and bad Enterprise UIs?

It is up to the users to decide what is good or bad. Not me. I included a photo of current generation of SAP UI.  This is really a historical snapshot in a sense because once you put something out in a company like SAP or MSFT it stays in the market for a decade or more.  In this second photo you can see a combination of traditional enterprise style data entry forms which has as it’s root window a portal/mashup type of environment.  Kind of a cross between the old client server world and Web 1.0.

Why is enterprise software user interface and user experience been a lack of focus, historically?

Because the functional requirements were so difficult to meet that the majority of engineering effort was spent on accuracy and reliability.  Similar to building the space shuttle or any other moon shot type endeavor.

Do you see change occurring and if so, what’s driving that change?

The main thing that is changing is that the buying decision for enterprise software is moving from the CIO level and into the hands of the users themselves.  These users have expectations based on popular retail products and the web.

What’s uniquely hard about designing for enterprise software?

Our next generation is much different and more in line with the expectations of Millennials featuring a lot more focus on collaboration and unstructured data.  All the business structured data is already captured in SAP.  There is no place else to put it but the unstructured stuff is 80% of the volume.   What makes Enterprise software different in this case is that even the unstructured information must be related to a business process (either formal or informal) and therefore must be treated with a degree of security, legal requirements and auditing that is simply not available in the types of collaboration tools on the market today.  Even today’s best web focused search tools are not adequate to meet the legal requirements.

What do you hope to get out of the Enterprise UI Summit this week?

Ideas and insights into whether the current approach of collaboration products can scale to meet the requirements of the large enterprise customers or if a totally new approach and opportunity exists.