5. Sloth

You've bought software that fits a clear business need, you've put it on everyone's desktop. Yet your employees still cling to the old-fashioned way of doing things - say, keeping their sales contacts in a Rolodex or Excel spreadsheet instead of in the contact management system, or handwriting their expense reports instead of using the new travel and entertainment software. They're just stubborn and lazy, right?

Although it's human nature to resist change, that doesn't mean slothful employees shoulder all the blame for failing to use new software. The software's executive sponsors have clearly fallen short in selling employees on the new software. "You could have a scenario where software is very relevant to the business, aligned with the strategy and tactics, but you haven't gotten the user to believe it's useful," says Rich Lindsay, CFO of The Boston Beer Company in Boston. Take sales force automation software. "Merely digitising the paper takes sales reps longer," he says. "If they don't get good feedback and see how it's relevant to their success or the company's success, there will be huge resistance and they'll want to go back to paper."

Shelfware Buster: Give employees a good reason to switch over to the new software.

When Boston Beer rolled out a new Web-based travel and entertainment software package, Lindsay knew that wooing his techno-phobic sales force would be priority number one.

"Automating the T&E just helps accounting," Lindsay says. "You have to find something that makes it relevant to the employees." He sold the sales force on efficiency: the software automatically downloads all of their corporate credit card transactions into a Web-based form. Then the employees merely assign the charges to the right categories and hit Submit. Two days later, they get their reimbursement wired directly into their bank accounts.

"It does take them a little bit longer to fill out the [Web] form, but they get their money weeks earlier," Lindsay says. He gave employees a six-month trial period to move over to the new system. "Superusers" - the early adopters - made the switch the quickest, and sold their peers on making the change. By the end of the trial period, all but 2 or 3 per cent of the employees had converted to the new system. "The ones that aren't on it, we call and ask if they need help," he says.

Start practising any one of these five shelfware busters, and you'll be on your way to ridding your company of wasted software. And about that bread maker and cross-country ski machine? Try a yard sale.

What Price Frustration?

Poor quality software could be costing corporations billions in lost productivity.

Ben Shneiderman wants to be the Ralph Nader of the software industry.

Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed took on Chevrolet and other automakers over the crash-hardiness of the Corvair and other American cars. Shneiderman, head of the University of Maryland's Human Computer Interaction Lab in College Park, wants to take on software giants like Microsoft over the way much of today's software is "unsafe at any bandwidth" - prone to crashes and freeze-ups, and the source of much user frustration. "This is the dark side of Moore's Law," Shneiderman says. "Machines are getting faster, but people are getting more frustrated [using them]."

Crashes, freezes, confusing menus, viruses and spam are more than just frustrating, Shneiderman says. They waste precious time, at home and at work. Shneiderman estimates productivity losses could amount to $US100 billion a year (he's currently doing a study to nail down a dollar figure).

Like Nader, Shneiderman has made his case in a book, Leonardo's Laptop, forthcoming from MIT Press in the northern autumn 2002. In it, he proposes that every time there's a crash, a user get a dollar; every time a user gets confused by a dialogue box, he or she would get 10 cents. "We need a public uprising, led by journalists, brought by Congress to industry leaders," he says. "It's time to get angry about the quality of software and bang on the table a bit. We should have greater expectations of industry."