3.Gluttony

Diners at an all-you-can-eat buffet can always rationalise that extra helping of mashed potatoes and the slice of apple pie ("Potatoes are a vegetable, right? And didn't I read somewhere that apples have the kind of fibre that lowers cholesterol? Besides, I've already paid for it . . ."). Likewise, enterprise software buyers who've got the green light (and the big dollars) to pay for a mega software project can always rationalise picking up a few extra modules. As O'Marah says, the sales rep tells them: "You're going to need it some day, buy it from me now. The quarter's going to close. Take it, and I'll go back and fight for you and give you 65 per cent off." ("Sixty-five per cent off what?" should be the question. "Those guys make those numbers up," says O'Marah. "I know - I used to make those numbers up myself.") Companies find themselves staring at a huge plateful of modules, woefully unprepared to handle the technological challenges and the business process changes needed to implement them all. "There's no way you can eat them all," O'Marah says, and no way that an organisation can absorb all of that IT-led change all at once. "They just sit there."

A variation of the gluttony problem is what O'Marah calls "the myth of the suite". It's all too easy to believe that if you want to have your supply chain connected, for example, you need to buy every module that the SCM vendor offers. "It's not really true that if you buy everything, it's all going to be wonderful and all work together," O'Marah says. "[SCM] doesn't really function as a suite . . . So there's really no reason to buy it as a suite."

Shelfware Buster: Stay focused on strategic goals.

The next time you're faced with a vendor trying to push a pricey, complex enterprise software suite on you, don't succumb to the pressure to buy everything all at once.

Home Shopping Network, for example, bought call centre, campaign management and marketing modules from Siebel, but Norm Wright, senior vice president of customer care, passed on several other modules that the sales rep pitched. His advice is to stay focused on core and near-term business needs when deciding what to buy. "Vendors will lead you to believe that you've got to buy all of these other pieces now because [if you wait] they'll be more expensive or you'll have trouble implementing them, and I don't buy that," Wright says. "In almost every case, you can get whatever module you need and bring it in when you're ready for it." And be realistic about your ability to implement what you buy in a reasonable time frame - before you fill up your plate.

4. Aggravation

Sometimes software doesn't get used because it is simply too hard to use, says Jakob Nielsen, a usability expert and principal at California-based Nielsen Norman Group. Customers typically use as little as 5 per cent of the functionality in any given shrink-wrapped software package, he says. They're just too overwhelmed by the complexity, and want to "learn the bare minimum to get going with the software".

Why the waste? Because whenever a customer requests a feature, vendors add it to the next release of the product, making it that much more complicated with each version. In-house developed software applications suffer from a different kind of usability glitch. "They are not as feature rich, but they are very clumsy and often designed in very awkward ways that do not match the way employees approach the tasks," Nielsen says. "The classic problem here is that the IT department listened too much to the managers rather than the people doing the job."

Shelfware Buster: Test software usability before rollout, and train people how to get the most out of it.

You could try complaining to the source of so much software frustration - the software vendors themselves. Some activists are trying to make vendors more accountable for the aggravation and lost productivity that their software's abysmal usability causes . But if you're stuck with a package that's particularly complex, and you need a more immediate fix, make sure that users receive adequate training on how to make the most productive use of what they've got.

If you're pulling your hair out over software crafted by your very own IS staff, it's even easier to go to the source - and easier to correct problems before they happen. Nielsen recommends that companies allot 10 per cent of their software implementation or upgrade budget to user testing. Developers may squawk: "That means I can only spend 90 per cent on features," they'll whine. "But people only need 90 per cent of the features," Nielsen says. "If you can build 90 per cent of the features and people can use them, that's much better than building 100 per cent of the features, but having half of them go unused."