Nobody wants to pay for better GUIs in enterprise software, so no vendor puts any attention into them. An Enterprise Architect explicitly explained to me (when I was raising a point of choosing a software package that had much better UI) that good UX is a small factor and company (a bank in that case) would rather buy cheaper software and just have its workers suffer more, because it's deemed more cost-effective.
And this is why the most polished part of most enterprise software packages is the dashboard/reporting function, the only part the C-levels might actually touch themselves.
Wouldn't productivity from better UI be something measurable that can be then advertised by vendors and extrapolated into savings for the customer? I feel like that could be a pretty compelling selling point to the CxOs.
How do you measure how much MS Teams sucks compared to Slack? All the CTO knows is that they have an enterprise license for Office along with Teams and the salesperson they talked to showed them how great it integrates with the rest of the suite.
In the EHR space, all the CMO (chief medical officer) cares about is it helps keep them in compliance. Why should they care if it’s hard for their office staff to use?
My company used UX as a competitive differentiator for Enterprise Software in the healthcare sector. It's so neglected by most software development companies, we were able to get the doctors as our champions to convince the bean counters to consider our products.
We did the same thing in the healthcare sector, but for safety event reporting! It's not like we even did anything groundbreaking with UX. One was just making it so it's easy to fill out a form quickly. You don't even have to touch the mouse if you don't want to. Users love it and it's increased event reporting by a good percentage.