Business vs Software
I am often involved with companies where a new software system is being rolled out across offices and the boardroom expectancy is for immediate benefits in their bottom line with ‘our new system’. I am very involved in terms of the actual rollouts when it is a card based, e-commerce based or transaction processing based solution rolling out, and from personal involvement on this level, am even more amazed from time to time just how much room management of companies give ‘us engineers’ to build the software processes independently from proper business analysis of their existing business practices.
With brand name software it is even more evident, with so much money spent on the implementation of an ERP or a financial system with little regard of what processes were already working within the company. By this I mean that these days there seems to be a tendency for managers to ‘trust’ the thought processes of the software engineer and therefore his or her product they are buying. They seem convinced that the software vendor or engineer must know more about the generic business model than they themselves, and so trust the creation of a virtual version of their business without any real analysis of their physical business. So instead of them telling the software vendor or engineer how the software should work in their business, they accept the model where the vendor or engineer’s software products forces their business to adapt instead.
My mantra all these years have been that technology cannot control business in such a way that business must change to accommodate it, just for the sake of accommodating the new technology purchase. Technology is intended to make our lives easier, not more complex, and changing business processes on the fly, just because that’s the way the ’system’ works, has always had the opposite, expensive and highly frustrating result of confused customers and employees instead.
Visiting Telkom for example will indicate that Telkom staff at the stores claim they cannot change the address you originally registered your telephone to, as the ’system will not allow this’ or even better, that your wife or partner cannot be registered as a co-account-holder because ‘the system has no room for this’. An even better example of this in business these days, is the problem ERP systems present us all, where you simply cannot integrate to the ERP system powered company unless you also have the same software. Or they simply cannot deliver a product or service to you, because their ERP system will not allow it in the open standard format your system communicates.
In SA that often means unless you also have SAP for example, you cannot do business on specific levels with some companies. A solution may be unbelievably easy to implement outside of the standard ‘SAP’ model, but if you are dealing with a CTO or IT staff that is or are SAP trained you cannot even try to communicate that to them. The ability to think beyond their ERP system simply does not exist. O, I am not slagging SAP here, it’s certainly not for any fault on their part as it is a good system as far as ERP systems go.
Sadly many companies just go with what is fashionable, regardless their own ability to truly earn back the huge costs incurred with the implementation of such systems, or the negative impact often made on their own business processes because they simply accept the software norm for a specific process must be ‘correct’ and implement it that way. I’m a software executive, so I am not slagging software here at all, but I am wondering out loud, ok, very loud, why it is I keep sitting in meetings where executives turn my way to explain to them how their own business should work. That seems wrong in so many ways. I know how my systems work and I know what benefits they can have for a company, but I also know that these systems are not perfect, not by a mile, in terms of implementing them as they are. My systems, as with other software products, are a 70% fit for companies, and my expectancy would be of my customers to tell me how they wish the 30% modification to be customized for their business.
Management, study your own businesses carefully, pick out only those parts that truly fail (often outside analysts can do this audit better than you), and then instruct software vendors / engineers to provide you with ways to make those ill functioning bits work better. That’s how software should be evaluated and implemented.
