Getting Out What You Put In

Nearly all business systems, ERP, CRM etc, work the same way.

They provide information that makes the business work better. And are powered by information that goes into them.

They are successful when the information out is clearly worth the trouble of getting the information in. And that needs to be so at all levels, from the business as a whole to each individual.

When implementing a system, or making changes, there’s an understandable tendency to focus on the bigger picture. The costs are usually high, the disruption very noticeable, and the return on investment is obviously tied to getting something back at the business level. What each individual involved gets out of it, personally, confuses the bigger issue.

Sometimes, I must say, even that obvious point isn’t considered. There are many and varied reasons for investing massive time, money and trouble in a new system, and the unacknowledged ones are often a bigger part than anyone wants to think about – marking territory, forcing change of apparently unrelated kinds, demonstrating authority. Where those are the dominant factors, success is measured by other things than what the new system can do, whatever the stated measures.

Considered for themselves, though, a successful business system is one that acts as a force multiplier for the information in the business, and is seen to do so.

Being seen to provide an information benefit … that is also more subtle than it first appears. As politicians discover, everybody wants benefits, and much fewer want the cost. In business systems, as in society, there is almost always a disconnect between what we get out and the cost of it. One person’s benefit is another’s cost. Even when, as in our own tiny business, there are very few people, future me can seem like someone who can manage fine if I don’t do this annoying data entry now.

We know this, don’t we? What we don’t often do is openly consider it and plan accordingly.

The three possible strategies

Consciously or otherwise, there are three basic strategies: discipline, incentive and automation, and they can be mixed.

Discipline and control are the obvious answers. It’s natural for business leaders to assume that if something is essential, like data entry, they can just say that it must be done and it will be. Practically, this is not ideal, even where it does actually happen as planned.

Incentives are better, just as long as they’re not naive incentives. Offering, for example, bonuses for completed data entry is not a true incentive, but closer to a benign sort of discipline. Real incentives make the clear link between the necessary work and the desired outcome, and help the work to seem worthwhile. In some cases it can be enough to put workers on different stages of a process close together, so that the problems arising from poor information are very visible to those at the stage when they can do something about it.

And automation? Well, that simply reduces the problem directly. People don’t like stopping what they’re doing to enter data about it, and will get round doing it if they can. If that data entry can be automatic, even partially, it will happen anyway with no friction, and everyone benefits. Connect a scale to the computer and nobody needs to enter a weight. Input documents with OCR. Scan RFID tags as items pass rather than have humans note them. Trigger changes on actions. Make users' working lives easier, and automation is welcomed.

So, for successful processes: make the data entry as automatic as possible, make it easy where you can’t make it automatic, link effort to results … and fall back on control only as a last resort.

This is not rocket science, and provides a useful lens to consider every process in a business, not only ones within formal systems, however small or large.

The well-documented lack of success in big systems projects is, I suggest, largely down to the fact that at the top levels of a business don’t think this way when organising them.

Actual practical steps towards doing this are the next thing …