The Right Tool for the Right Job

“We’re going to tell a story about cheeseburgers in a filing cabinet.”

That’s what I said when I started talking about this article.

Technically, you can put a cheeseburger in a filing cabinet. It fits. The drawer closes. Problem solved.

Except, of course, you’ve put a cheeseburger in a filing cabinet.

Modern SaaS platforms give us an incredible number of options. They are flexible, configurable, connected, and often capable of doing far more than the specific job they were originally purchased to do. That flexibility creates real opportunities for businesses, but it can also steer the conversation toward a deceptively simple question: Can we make this tool do this?

We all know what Dr. Ian Malcolm would say to that.

Most Systems Didn't Start Out Complicated

Technology environments have grown, evolved, split off, come back together, and invented new solutions in ways we couldn't imagine even just a few years ago. A company needed to solve a problem, and someone found a practical way to solve it. A spreadsheet worked, so they used a spreadsheet. A manual process got the job done. A shared location gave everyone access to information they needed. Later, the organization invested in more solutions: CRM, ERP, Saas. As their data grew, so grew their solutions toolbox.

Workflows don't always follow the evolution on the same cadence. A CRM may become the system of record for customer information, while part of the customer process continues to live in a spreadsheet, some of which may still be a manual or even non-digital process. The CRM might have captured the invoices, but if the inventory list wasn't configured to live in the same environment fast enough, it's likely someone is still maintaining a separate spreadsheet because it gives them information the CRM doesn't quite provide in its current configuration.

Everything still works. That's part of what makes these situations interesting.

The cost usually doesn't arrive as one obvious failure. It shows up in small amounts of effort repeated across the business: entering the same information twice, time spent looking in multiple places, reconciling records, checking numbers before using them, or relying on the person who knows where something is and how it works. One workaround may be insignificant but multiple workarounds accumulate in time lost.

This is where I start to get excited. Inefficiencies are excellent points of cost and time savings for a company. Anything you do multiple times over a day or weeks that can be automated, should be automated. Freeing up human labor for tasks that computers can do and ideas that programs can't generate on their own. Find the inefficiencies, automate them, calculate the ROI, rinse and repeat, in the best way.

Buying the Tool Isn't the Same as Implementing It

I found out recently that “#1” doesn't always mean quite what I assumed it meant. Sometimes a service company earns that ranking through surveys or an independent evaluation of the service it provides. Other times, #1 means the company sold the most of whatever it specializes in. Neither measure is inherently wrong. They’re just measuring different things.

SaaS utilization has a similar problem. We can measure whether an organization bought a platform and whether people are using it. Neither necessarily tells us whether the business is getting the value it expected from that investment.

We've covered the data and the systems. The third piece in a successful implementation is the people. And this last piece matters: change management approaches like ADKAR exist because configuring technology doesn't automatically change the way people work. Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement help bridge the space between installing a solution and making a new process sustainable.

Without that investment, an organization can end up with a capable SaaS platform sitting beside many of the same manual processes it was expected to improve. That doesn't necessarily mean the technology failed or that the original decision was wrong. Only that the implementation stopped before the organization reached the outcome it originally intended.

Information Has a Job Too

Integrous is one of my favorite words. The Oxford English Dictionary references it as a word that fell out of fashion in the 1600s, but I find it to be an excellent adjective. So, I'm bringing it forward to the oft-hallucinogenic age of AI: integrous data deserves the same kind of thought and weight we give to the selection of technology. [oed.com]

This becomes particularly important when the information supports decisions that eventually have financial consequences. The path from an awkward spreadsheet to EBITDA isn't necessarily a straight line, and it doesn't need to be exaggerated to matter. Time spent locating information has a cost. Reconciliation takes time. Duplicate entry takes time. Errors and rework, time. Data you're less than confident in? You guessed it. That doesn't make every spreadsheet bad or send every manual process to the chopping block. Every process should be evaluated for best procedure, and if that means paper and pencil, better to stick with the best version of a process that to digitize it for points in a game no one should be playing.

What information are we managing? Where should it live? Which system should be the system of record? Who creates the information, who needs it, and what happens to it next? What outcome are we trying to improve? Those questions start to connect technology decisions back to the business they are supposed to support.

Better Utilization Doesn't Always Mean Using a Tool for More Things

There is a reasonable instinct to get as much value as possible from the technology we've already purchased. But getting more value from a tool doesn't always require giving it more jobs. Sometimes better SaaS utilization means allowing a CRM to be a really good CRM. The value comes from planning, implementation, training, integration, and governance. When your new CRM works in tandem with your other evaluated and optimized processes, the platform becomes more than somewhere to store information. It becomes a source the business can rely on.

Stacey Bales has described this principle simply: “Tools can accelerate a well-designed system, but they cannot substitute for one.” [beqic.com]

The individual tool matters, the suite of tools that supports the data at all lifecycle stages matters. The value depends heavily on embracing the system around it.

Improvement Doesn't Have to Mean Starting Over

Once an organization starts looking closely at these connections, the number of opportunities can seem overwhelming. There may be years of spreadsheets, manual processes, workarounds, disconnected systems, partial implementations, and perfectly useful tools that simply aren't being used to their full potential.

The good news is that improvement doesn't have to mean replacing everything. Or anything.

Keep the desired end state in view and work backward. Identify which information matters most. Understand the processes that create and consume it. Decide where that information should live and which systems, and people, should own which responsibilities. Look for the places where incomplete or misplaced implementations create meaningful operational or financial impact. Consider engaging with a specialist for an outsider's view (shameless plug).

These things create the opportunity for controlled investment instead of wholesale transformation. One improvement may require configuration. Another may involve an integration or process change. Both will undoubtedly require people change management. Some improvements may require new technology, while others may surprisingly reveal that the organization already owns exactly what it needs.

That is the part of this work I find compelling. There is real business value sitting inside ordinary processes, usually using something you already own. I used a music CD to cut pizza for the first three years of living on my own. I kind of miss it now, because normal pizza cutters don't fit in the drawer as well. However, normal pizza cutters....actually cut pizza. I eventually invested in a good pizza cutter, and picked another drawer. (Bet you didn't think we'd be back to weird items in drawers by the end of this article, did you?)

The goal isn't a perfect technology environment. It's an intentional one, where the tools fit the work, the information has the right home, and the people using both can trust the system around them.