Towards Trust in Complex Cloud-based ERP Systems by Informing Users about the System Status

Abstract

Modern cloud-based ERP systems are complex distributed software applications. These systems became more powerful over the last decades and provide more features to satisfy user needs than previous generations of ERP systems. Furthermore, they are integrated with other cloud-based systems. [Question/problem] The resulting increase in complexity leads to a higher probability of failures within this integrated system. This makes it difficult for users to fully understand these systems and even qualified key users don’t have an overview of possible system issues anymore. As a result, the number of support calls and diffuse support ticket requests have increased in the last years. Moreover, ERP partner organizations such as insideAx experience that users lose trust in their systems. [Principal idea/results] The goal of our work is to foster the trust of ERP users in cloud-based ERP systems and to reduce the number of unnecessary support requests, by enhancing existing user feedback and monitoring mechanisms and provide a visualization of system health indicators to users. Overall, these visualizations and explanations of the system health status need to be easy to understand by users. [Contribution] In this workshop paper, we provide insights from industry on how to foster user trust in complex software systems and depict a conceptual solution which makes use of system monitoring data to communicate the system status to users in a simple and understandable way. Our conceptual solution, for which we also provide a first implementation architecture proposal, foresees that simple modifications to the software and ambient light devices allow to build such visualizations. We consider this solution to be a novel extension to existing user feedback and monitoring approaches and therefore relevant for CrowdRE.