It’s not “execs dumb and bad,” it’s that execs have different priorities than you think they do, which I think is partially dandare’s point.

Executives at a large company are divorced from your reality at your level of the job.

Incidentally, that’s part of the fun of working at smaller companies, though the variance is higher there’s also the potential to work more closely with good earnest executives who also want the company to succeed.

ERP guy here

>people complain that things don't work

that's a problem and we're going to have to fix it

>it takes an order of magnitude more time and effort

that's not a problem

the fact that Jane the accounting drone has to do twice the amount of work, or has to hire an intern to help her out, or even wants to quit because the job is so awful now is not a problem

it's a rounding error in the overall cost of implementing an ERP system

a new screen with some new data to show for the exec is worth 20 Jane's and her opinions on the new system

you can't even call the new system unethical or fraudulent because 10 people other then Jane can now stop using broken excel sheets to organize their work

basically Jane is collateral damage

The simplest explanation is a mis-alignment in incentives.

Executives want to have successful projects to show to their value to an organization. But usually the board members are unable to comprehend the details of a project. So the herd mentality kicks in. The CTO will seek approval for SAP and provide Gartner magic quadrant BS to give the board a level of comfort.

Now whether SAP is the right tool, or if it inconveniences users doesn't matter a whit to the CTO. All that matters is budget and timeline. The CTO wants to be able to speak to the board and say that the project timeline was met and under budget. All else is a complete non-factor.

> Do none of the decision makers talk with the people that work for them?

In many cases, no. In part because the people that do the operational work aren't the same people who work for the decision maker.

The third point is plain old corruption, so there's no reason for anybody to be surprised that the second point is incompetence.

I find smaller companies can have a more direct connection to their users, so the outcome is usually better UX. The disconnect from the user in enterprise software regularly results in poor UX, and the incentives to improve it just don't make their way to the people who need to hear them.

I hate it how UX is so much more important than actual funtionality. I blame Instagram, Apple and consumer apps in general for that.