Last week we attended the 2010 Airline & Aerospace MRO & Operations IT Conference in Frankfurt.  
One of the disappointments for us at the conference was the lack of real innovation in the design of the MRO business systems that were on show. Whilst many other industries are abstracting away the complexities of the process, workflow or machine, MRO enterprise software vendors seem to be particularly proud of the complexity and functional overload of their software solutions.  On more than one occasion we had CEOs and Sales Directors alike explain to us just how fantastically bewildering their systems were and how users were demanding more and more complex, feature rich solutions to their problems.

We had hoped that truly service orientated solutions would be available by now, solutions that hide the complexity behind a simple, easy to use interface, designed to do a specific job very well. We’ve all seen how glass cockpits over recent years have simplified a pilot’s role, even though the complexity behind the UI has increased beyond recognition.

Here’s the cockpit for the Concorde designed back in the sixties.  So complex it took three people to fly it.

Copyright Dr Richard Murray and licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons Licence.
 
Compare that to the latest generation A380, a much cleaner, simpler user interface that focuses on the essentials for flying.

Copyright Naddsy and licensed for reuse under a Creative Commons License.

Whilst the human factors within the cockpit have been analyzed ad infinitum, the human factors in the hanger seem to have been hugely overlooked.  Are maintenance engineers and their managers really demanding more and more complex systems?  The folk selling them software seem to think so.  I’m sorry but I just don’t buy it.

Other than in the MRO sector when did you last hear users clamoring for more complex software?  In the bleeding edge industry of social media users are demanding “magical” user experiences that delight through ultra-simple applications that focus on doing one function and performing it perfectly.  This sector is thriving and the trends created are spilling out into the rest of IT.  Using web design as an example, modern web sites are becoming simpler and simpler with loads of white space and clear calls to action being the norm.  Take these two examples of airline websites.  I wouldn’t mind betting which site has the better conversion rate per visitor.

The current American Airlines website, voted one of the world’s worst airline websites.

 
The award winning Nature Air website uses a simple and clear call to action.



OK, maybe I’m being a bit harsh.  It’s taken the best part of 40 years to move cockpit design from the Buck Rogers style instrumentation of the past to a more rationalized, simplified next generation cockpit panel.  The technology has certainly helped this outcome over the years.  To be fair, developing a new interface for Enterprise software is no walk in the park.  It could be thousands of man hours in design, build and testing before a vendor has completely retooled their entire system.  But if you’re buying enterprise software now, with a life cycle of 5 maybe 10 years, it could be out of date by the time you’ve finished implementing it in 18 to 24 months’ time.  But I don’t see any enterprise MRO software even heading in the right direction yet.

The wall to wall enterprise solutions of yesterday simply don’t cut it when it comes to simplifying processes and keeping engineer non-productive time to a minimum.  The age of features is dead.  Software developers should be focusing on distilling features and processes to their bare minimum functional requirements and performing those functions perfectly with a simple intuitive interface that anyone can understand.  They should be building their software around services which can be consumed by any application to perform the function they operate.  Engineers like spanners because they have evolved to be to most simple and elegant tool for the job.  MRO enterprise software has a lot of evolving to do it seems.

So why is MRO Enterprise software so far behind the times?  Is it lack of investment or a simple lack of innovation and foresight in the MRO market?  Let me know what you think.