I loved growing up in New Jersey.  The big yards that everyone had, the 4 different seasons, the passionate sports fans.  All great.  Except when I’d walk into our house after a fun day outside and get my first whiff of that awful smell.  It was unmistakeable.  ”Oh, no.  Dad is cooking LIVER!”  It was an annual thing that my Dad forced upon myself and my older brother.  Liver for dinner and no getting around it.  I’d break out a full bottle of Heinz, but it would hardly cover the taste.  It was, and still is, the most revolting thing I ever ate.

It got me thinking about enterprise applications (e.g., procurement and expense management) and how they are viewed in organizations.

Now, there are a couple kinds of applications. The first type of application is reserved for a few, well-trained power users; we’ll call this kind the “5 User App”.  This application is designed for a limited number of users in your company whose jobs are probably tied to the application.  Think: The receivables clerk in the finance system, a planner in a supply chain app, a pricing specialist in an optimization app, etc.   The other kind of application is the “Employee App”.  That’s the application that everyone might use periodically:  the purchase request system, the expense report system, the system that lets you check your paystub and setup your direct deposit, the employee performance review system, etc.

Now back to liver.   Liver is something that most everyone hates.  It isn’t pretty, it’s an awful experience and you fear it.  If liver was an business app, it better be the “5 User App”.    Those limited number of users might not like it,  but it’s their job to be specialists. They need to know how everything works.  They’ll spend 30-100% of their day in it.   Just keep it contained to only those 5 users.

Now if you serve liver to your entire company in the “Employee App”, you better have some great job security.  I couldn’t overrule my Dad, but employees will sniff out the liver and revolt against using it.  Your employee application needs to be so simple, so easy and so effective that people “just do it”.  No amount of change management, no amount of championing by senior leaders, no amount of CEO force will overcome the pervasive stench of a liver application.  It might take awhile for the troops to mobilize, but they are.

Don’t believe me?  Check out these tweets of disgruntled employees:

The moral of this story is easy: Consider more intuitive and–let’s be honest–less outdated business applications within your organization. You’ll see compliance shoot up. And you’ll see happier faces around the dinner table…er, workplace.

Note to Dad: I don’t think I’ll ever really get over my liver memories, but thanks for teaching me a valuable lesson.