When there are too many systems

Business and online platforms are now symbiotic in nature. You can't have a business without using online services and online services wouldn't exist without businesses to drive them. The interrelation makes the engine work. Delivering each function as a microservice and a subscription is great for rapid customer acquisition. Apps have been developed to only do X and they do it exceptionally well. During the initial stages of Dashboard Online, I was constantly told to focus on a niche and go deep, but I didn't see it that way, I wanted to build a platform that would cater to the level the business is at rather than the type. And it’s not with developing a narrow-focused application. 

The problem I witnessed is the burden laid on these businesses to find skilled technicians to tie all the pieces together and make the engine work. The only way they see that these online platforms will work for them is when an expert has to step in and do the job for them. A business is not just the marketing, the sales process or the delivery of goods and services. 

There are admin functions, executive responsibilities, compliance and government and industry regulations, legal and it goes on and on. In my days as GM for a local Queensland Building company, we spent countless hours setting up processes and procedures, automating, documenting and generally trying to stay organised in a rapidly changing legislated environment. When I moved away from the building industry back into IT support and development the company I worked for had little to no systems or processes in place. 

With deliberation and discussion, the owner agreed to my suggestion that everything needs to be documented. Microservices and subscriptions became an everyday conversation, and finally decided on what to subscribe to, some worked some didn't, some were used for 4-6 months then scrapped for a better option. 

The process of elimination required time, effort and a lot of money. In the end, we were building systems across 4-5 platforms and then building processes to manage the building of processes. Spreading tasks across multiple platforms made it time-consuming for the entire team and costly for clients. Because there were so many functions to learn the team spent their time trying to work out schedules between learning and doing the actual work.

 

Productivity then was split in half. I realised that although the services provided were polished and robust, in most cases they were not built and designed to work for the business but for the provider to generate revenue.