Are you able to leverage business technology in order to advance your business?
Most businesses use 40-60 apps and programs to accomplish their goals. However, some businesses are able to work efficiently using 3 or fewer core programs.
How many programs does your organization use? How do you currently deal with this software overload problem?
Your goal should be to create Systemplicity, which is the state of having a technology infrastructure that is uncomplicated and easy to understand, maintain, manage, scale, and use.
If the complexity of your business is holding you back, then Systemplicity is for you.
How many different systems do you have within your organization?
Before you can create Systemplicity, you need to know the number of systems your business is currently using on a regular basis.
Is it 2? 12? 37? More?
What do you use for sales, invoicing, scheduling, spreadsheets, managing tasks, etc.?
Really think about the different apps, programs, and systems you use on a daily basis and the business capabilities they have.
Each of these systems often requires licensing, support, training, and experience for employees to be able to traverse the system and use it to its full potential.
HubSpot, for example, is an all-in-one marketing solution and CRM that handles a variety of organizational needs. On its own, the system is very intuitive, but that doesn’t mean you can hand the keys to your organization’s Hubspot account and instantly know what to do.
Within HubSpot, there is email management, automated workflows, deals, support tasks, lead scoring, and more. All of these different features require specific knowledge to ensure you’re getting the most out of the system.
Your organization likely has many variations of systems with their own complexities. For some of these systems, only one or two people may know how they work.
This creates silos in your company. If your marketing and sales team are using Hubspot, but your operations and accounting team are using different software, it can cause many challenges ranging from communications to reporting. You also never want to have everything fall on one staff member. What happens if that person quits tomorrow? Would you know how to access everything you need within all of your systems?
It’s better to simplify these systems so you don’t reach this point; you never want systems that are too hard to maintain, scale, and use.
How many layers of complexity do your systems have?
Within any one system, you may have various layers of complexity.
From a user’s viewpoint, completing tasks may be a cumbersome process. Your system might create inefficiencies or need additional support in order to get work done.
You may also have complexities with the people who manage your systems. If security is an issue, you might need a team to keep your system up-to-date.
Older software often has more bandaids added to it in order to keep it working.
But, when your systems and infrastructure are outdated or highly complex, they are much harder to scale.
One customer used the “copy and paste” method with an entire ecommerce system to manage their new clients. They created a specific website for one client, and when they got another client, they asked their IT team to copy the original website.
This process worked as they got more and more clients. The problem came when they had to update all of the systems at once: this method was no longer scalable.
Anytime you’re copying and pasting, you’re adding complexities to your business that don’t need to be there.
How do organizations reach the point of having overly complicated software?
Sometimes, businesses have reasons they ended up using their current systems and are unable to make changes rapidly. These include forced and self-inflected changes.
Forced
Forced complexities of your current systems are driven by external factors like government regulations or customer requests.
You may be working with HIPAA or PCI compliance standards.
Sometimes, competitors force your direction because of your industry and associated changes.
However, even with forced complexity, you can still find ways to simplify your systems.
Self-Inflicted
“How did we get here?”
Self-inflicted complexities are driven by choices and changes that you made as a business or team.
You may not have done this on purpose, but you needed to create certain processes in order to complete your work and keep your company running.
Sometimes, spreadsheets have their own name like “Big Bertha” within an organization. They are often monster spreadsheets that include everything a business needs to manage its operations. As the business expanded, this monster got bigger and bigger until a team of people was needed to maintain the spreadsheet system.
The problem is that you may have multiple people with different ideas influencing this spreadsheet. Sometimes, these employees leave and you might forget why you added certain features in the first place.
The “system” became its own named enemy by the company because it was easy to just work within this existing solution.
Understanding the costs of your systems
The costs of your systems can include both direct and indirect costs, and aren’t limited to your finances.
Costs can be security risks you expose yourself to with an outdated piece of software. It can be the revenue you’re missing out on because you don’t have the right business intelligence and reporting in place.
Let’s take a look at the different costs associated with using an outdated system or systems.
Physical Equipment and Licensing
The more systems you have, the more users and licenses you need to buy. This is the simple cost of using the software.
For example, HubSpot is an expensive software that costs between $1000-$4000 per month to use all of their main hubs. This price is before you add the number of users or the total number of marketing contacts within the system.
Vendors and Staff
Staff and labor expenses are necessary to maintain your software and accomplish the daily tasks needed to run your business.
This means you have to hire staff to make sure their team gets the job done
Your system itself may require internal or external staff to keep it running.
Let’s say your ecommerce website runs on Magento. This is an ecommerce website that requires many updates in order to maintain security and functionality.
We have customers with entire support teams dedicated to maintaining their Magento websites because they are so large and complex.
Employee Engagement
Your employees themselves are the biggest cost to your organization.
Sometimes, your systems don’t help them complete the work they need to.
Every minute they spend waiting for slow software to load or relearning how to utilize complex software is compounded by the number of employees they have.
Many employees are unable to work efficiently with outdated software. There may be shortcuts they don’t know about because the software isn’t intuitive.
Organizations often have lots of employees that are working, but the systems take all of their energy and focus and prevent them from accomplishing tasks.
These inefficiencies add up as costs that are hard to see. They’re important to consider when thinking about how much you really save when you have more up-to-date software.
All of these factors lead to low motivation, accountability, and productivity. That means your staff may not be working as hard as they could and might ultimately leave your organization.
Costs of Working Inefficiently
Cumbersome systems require extra training to master. Your employees may end up taking extra coffee breaks in between their fights with the system.
As a manager of the organization, you may see that you have a lot of staff working, but tasks aren’t getting done.
The reason may be that your systems are too complicated and your team spends all of their energy using the software.
Lack of Insights
“I’ll go with my gut.”
This phrase may work for certain scenarios, but there is a limit to how far gut-based decision-making can go.
You (the CEO, office manager, or person in charge) might have the answers, but how do you share this with your team to see how you’re doing as a company?
You may have employees whose jobs are to make reports. They may be great at using spreadsheets because they can export from one system into a spreadsheet and use formulas to paint a picture of what’s working.
However, there is are time and costs associated with this process. You may cause delays within your organization if you don’t take advantage of automation available with custom software solutions.
You won’t be able to understand what’s working and what could use improvement.
Your company may be losing money because of this time spent waiting for data in order to analyze it.
These days, you want your system to be able to do this automatically and quickly.
Security Risks
Complex systems can create more security risks.
Why?
The more systems you have, the greater the attack surface. You may have multiple people managing these systems to make sure that everyone is secure.
Everyone responsible for managing these systems has to do their part to keep them safe.
That’s why we always recommend starting with a security assessment of your current systems and processes.
Procrastination and Numbness
If your system is already a mess of interlinked spreadsheets and legacy systems, adding one small update won’t make a difference.
Think about a sink full of dishes. What’s one more dish? You can clean the entire sink later.
The problem is that these issues compound over time, so it’s better to focus on one dish at a time.
You might be thinking, “I’m not even sure where to start.”
When this happens, take simple steps towards simplification.
The important part is to take action as soon as you can.
How do you work towards having less complicated software
Once you know you have a problem, it’s time to work toward the solution.
Eliminate
You need to begin by removing software that isn’t necessary anymore.
Ask yourself:
- Is there a way to eliminate the complexity and requirements we have in place?
- What is driving the need for this complexity?
- What would happen if you got rid of X and replaced it with Y? What if we replaced it with nothing new?
It may seem impossible at first, but making small steps toward this outcome can go a long way.
Some of our customers have said that there is no way to change their current processes.
Start by asking yourself the big question:
- “What would we need to do if we eliminated QuickBooks?”
- “What would we need to do if we eliminated Salesforce?”
- “What would we need to do if we eliminated spreadsheets?”
It seems absurd. But one company we helped went from thinking they needed to spend millions to instead only needing to spend hundreds of thousands because they set up this thought experiment.
How much do you think you might be able to save?
Consolidate
Can you consolidate your systems? Vendors? Teams? Systems?
Most people say they need them all. There is a cost to merging two systems or vendors from a business perspective.
But there are also costs to having multiple systems, as we have detailed above.
Think: “is it worthwhile to consider consolidating these?” Weigh the value of having fewer systems and team members managing a convoluted infrastructure.
You may not need to completely merge them, but you might be able to integrate them instead.
Outsource
Let’s say you run an ecommerce store. You need to make sure you’re incorporating PCI compliance into your system to protect your customers’ information.
You could choose to handle compliance within your organization, or you can outsource it to authorize.net or PayPal instead.
With the latter,, you don’t need to worry about it yourself.
As another example, if you manage WordPress, you can outsource to a hosting company to manage your website for you.
Try to think of the “expenses” you can cut so your team can focus on what they do best.
The goal is to leverage your partners and vendors rather than build something on your own.
You could hire business analysts and developers, or you could outsource to a third-party software development company instead.
Standardize
Create standardization around your technologies, platforms, and processes.
If you’re able to reduce complexities you can make things easier to scale, maintain, and evolve.
Creating processes to manage your systems can certainly help with simplification.
Conclusion
To summarize everything you need to know about simplifying your systems: get started!
Start with the low-hanging fruit and go from there
Focus on the success of your teams and the systems they use. Change to a “how could we” frame of mind to start the simplification process. Think about what your end goal may look like and take small steps to get there.
To help you get started, here are a few questions to ask yourself as part of an internal audit:
- What are you paying for every one of your IT expenses, software systems, etc.?
- What are the systems you’re using and who’s using them?
- What are you paying for risk assessment software and vendors?
Take the first step and start to think about these questions.
If you’re looking for more individualized support and guidance, reach out to one of our consultants.
