Is usability being neglected?

Doug Grant posed a question to me in a comment thread on his blog (emphasis mine):

... taking the application governance view of “great features” vs. “support costs”, this is generally a key issue that we don’t often have tools to quantify when buying or managing our enterprise applications, do you think? It just seems to me that the investment around measurement of application effectiveness and ROI pales in comparison to what we spend for hardware and software…. virtually invisible.

My blog problem inconvenienced you and other users, but how about enterprise apps we buy, the support costs of which are never tracked? Ideas?

It's a good challenge. Off the top of my head, here are a few thoughts.

• Way too many UIs are lousy. A cartoon, also from Doug's blog, illustrates part of the problem.
• There's a huge industry trend toward ease of deployment. This is particularly pronounced in the area of analytics. More generally, it's a huge deal whenever the driver of a technology purchase is a business department rather than an IT organization.
• Buyers too often look at UIs in the wrong way. That is, they look at what's cool or exciting, not what's easy to learn (and re-learn after it's been forgotten). Of course, sometimes they go to the other extreme, and demand a UI that requires zero learning, in that it's exactly the same as what they know already. To a first approximation, that's a good idea, but it can get in the way of innovation and technical advance.
• Since every user organization has different needs, with a different mix of tasks, different personnel, and different training practices, rigorously quantified measurement seems like a tough problem.