When it comes to enterprise IT solutions, I tend to put Kronos in the “rock” category, as in “like a rock.” As one Kronosite once told me, they don’t necessarily do things the fastest, and they don’t often push the envelope when it comes to fancy, cutting-edge technology innovations, but once they do decide to do something, they do it as thoroughly and whole-heartedly as possible.

One area where Kronos is not shy about pushing the envelope is when it comes to human capital management. Not only are they determined to provide the best HR and WFM apps possible (I tend to care mostly about WFM from a tech coverage stand-point), they are determined to demonstrate best practices internally in the very processes they help enable as a solution provider. And that carries through to product development. If you asked me who has the best user interface (UI) out there — across enterprise applications, forget about just WFM — I would say Kronos is at least in the top 5, if not at the top of the list.

True to form, where the rubber meets the road for Kronos is the UI design for its WFM suite. Here is a company that has embraced the idea of usability in a way few enterprise software vendors have – in part because, to be fair, the bulk of Kronos’s end-users tend to be lower wage, front-line workers. So they need to make their app as easy to use as possible. You can’t have the same usability expectations for, say, a merchandise planner as for an hourly store worker. But that’s where things get interesting.

One of the biggest trends looming ahead for retail IT is the consumerization of technology — the idea that business technology will have to take more innovation from what’s going on in consumer technology than the reverse (which is a lot of what has happened to-date). This isn’t just about devices, though mobile and tablets have garnered a lot of that kind of attention. This is about how users expect technology to act, and how they expect to interact with technology.

Here, Kronos has something of an advantage, because they’ve had to think almost like consumer technologists while delivering enterprise capabilities. So they’ve been aggressive about Kronos mobile apps, and easy ways to leverage other aspects of mobile — text and voice — to facilitate things like shift-swapping or filling open shifts. They’ve also, though, extended that philosophy to the core suite itself. Their latest version not only takes advantage of flexible tabs and widgets, it makes alternate workspaces available (think multiple desktops at your fingertips, or whatever it is that Apple is calling what takes the place of Spaces on the Mac), and it provides a slide-out side window with contextual tools that can be added as a widget or a tab with drag-and-drop ease. It sounds complicated when I describe it, but it almost looks touch-screen ready out of the box, and it’s really intuitive — for store employees, for managers, and for anyone driving a schedule.

When you combine it with Kronos’s latest version of their time clock, which looks more like a tablet than the time clocks I have known, is touch-screen enabled and includes a developer kit so that external apps can be enabled on the device, I walk away with an impression of a vendor that understands more about what the consumerization of IT is going to mean to enterprise software than any vendor I’ve seen to-date.

Kronos occupies but one slice of the technology that a retail enterprise needs to be successful – one option within that one slice – but I look at them as a bell-weather example of what all enterprise software is ultimately going to need to become — touch-friendly, drag-and-drop enabled, context-driven, and designed around how people work, rather than how the data or transaction is organized. Even more interesting, the company that made touch work — Apple — is now taking on voice with Siri, if you want a look at what may yet come next.

Big changes coming to IT. Big opportunities to rethink how people interact with software.