Well, let's not get too carried away, but some of those kinds of more engaging features have been finding their way into some Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications lately, according to Martens. "We're seeing it in CRM and others. It could happen here in ERP, maybe."

ERP users are also looking for collaboration features, according to the study. "We're hearing a lot about collaboration on the CRM side, but vendors are also talking about it for ERP, too," she says. "I think there is a strong use case for it, especially in the Human Capital Management (HCM) world. It could be very helpful to bring together ad hoc groups of people for discussions within ERP applications."

covers Enterprise Applications, SaaS, CRM, and Cloud Computing for CIO.com. Follow Todd on Twitter . Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter and on Email Todd at You can also join Todd in the "CIO Forum" group on to talk with CIOs and IT managers about the things that keep them up at night.

in CIO's Applications Drilldown.