Just Say No To Inflexible Software

A company purchased a business management software package. Their expectations were whipped into a frenzy by the sales material and hype, with high hopes that it would streamline their work processes and gain huge efficiencies. It was "integrated", "specific to [their] industry", "web enabled" and "customizable".

Unfortunately, in retrospect, these terms mean:

• "integrated" within itself, and only well-suited to a company that happens to run exactly the way the software is designed to work. No integration with other packages, limited import-export functionality, and no automation capabilities.
• "specific to [their] industry" but not nearly as advanced and flexible as the software that most other industries are using. If it's a choice between industry-specific and flexible, choose flexible.
• "web enabled" means they have a web-browser based interface to do specific, limited tasks. The interface is not customizable, and is clunky and user-unfriendly.
• "customizable" means that you can pay them to customize it, but can't do a darn thing with it yourself.

State-of-the-art for modern software is easy-to-use with flexible customization and seamless web and mobile interfaces. If software can't match the way you do business, you're going to have to create all kinds of workarounds, you're going to be writing down all kinds of clunky step-by-step manual procedures, and you're going to hate it. You're not going to get the productivity gains that the brochures lead you to expect.

Work on your processes first, get rid of the waste, the overprocessing, the handoffs, the defects, then find some software that can automate it. If you do it the other way around, that clunky old dinosaur software is going to bite you.