Talk to your ERP system

These days, thanks to the internet and cloud services, data can be accessible to anyone at any time. You don’t need to be stuck at a desk to browse social or business data.

To interact with enterprise software, however, you are still stuck behind the screens and keyboards on your smartphone, tablet or laptop, and have been so for the last three decades. Yet there are many situations when you are not able to use your phone, but still need to access business data to remain productive: when driving, for instance, particularly if wasting valuable time in a traffic jam.

Whatever innovation we have seen throughout the years, talking remains a natural way to communicate (teenagers excluded, possibly, but that’s a whole other article). So we thought that IFS Labs should explore the opportunity for people to start talking to their enterprise software. The result was a mobile app that lets the user control his or her enterprise application using their voice, via a smartphone or tablet.

Rather than go into detail about how it works — although it’s pretty simple, really — let me step outside my comfort zone of enterprise software for a moment to explore how we already use voice interaction today.

If I need to get in contact with my broadband supplier at home, I first navigate through voice interaction in their support centre to explain the issue. It’s convenient and works very well. I’m also a big fan of the Google Translate app, which can help me to order sushi and a beer in Japanese as I frequently visit Tokyo on business. It’s a bit embarrassing, but fun.

Looking at enterprise software, there are a number of situations where voice has the greatest potential. It might not necessarily be the only user experience in a given scenario, but it’s certainly a great complementary one.

For instance:

• for users with various disabilities who cannot see or use a keyboard and a screen;
• for users who are in eyes-busy and hands-busy situations such as driving, wearing protective gloves preventing them from touching a device, or getting instructions when repairing equipment;
• for users who need a very simple user interface (think Google search, Siri or Cortana) where you don’t get paralysed by lots of menus or buttons but instead just ask the system simple questions and are guided through your queries.

Even if new technologies can offer cool new things, I’d like to see if there are some potential benefits to be gained.

Using the TomTom Traffic Index, we can see some statistics on how traffic jams in major cities delay people. While you’d expect that Los Angeles and London are among the top 20 most congested cities in the world — 10th and 16th, respectively — it might surprise you that Sydney comes in at 21st, worse than Paris (22nd out of 146 on the list) and New York (45th). Other Australian state capitals aren’t too much better, with Melbourne ranking 60th (worse than Berlin), Perth 73rd, Adelaide 81st and Brisbane 88th.

TomTom also calculates the average expected delay on a 60-minute round trip due to congestion compared with a free-flowing traffic situation. For Sydney it’s 24 minutes, Melbourne 20 minutes, Perth 19 minutes, and Adelaide and Brisbane 18 minutes. That’s a huge amount of wasted time if you calculate it out on a dailyy, week or monthly basis.

So, you can see how talking to your enterprise software in your vehicle to check some business data to have on hand before arriving at your destination could be a smart use of non-productive time spent in traffic.

I’m sure you can think of many more ways that talking could improve the user experience of your enterprise software and your organisation’s productivity. It’s something you should probably start thinking about because the reality is just around the corner.

Martin Gunnarsson, Director – Product Strategies & IFS Labs, IFS Software