Sometimes businesses don’t feel the pain.
When you provide a product or service to a business, often you’re fulfilling a need, providing a service or filling a gap. Generally providing something useful that improves that business in someway.
But also often, businesses don’t feel pain and carry on blindly.
It reminds me of the old joke, about a guy continuously banging his head against a brick wall, “why on earth are you doing that?” A passers-by asks, “Because it’s so nice when I stop doing it “ was the reply.
So for example a business might use a tried and trusted delivery service that offers a reliable but not particularly efficient service. Unaware that new services are available, that are highly efficient, easier to manage and much more competitively priced.
Similarly, business may continue to hold weekly face-to-face meetings, which everybody hates, are time-consuming and are generally unproductive. Unaware of that online alternatives exist which are more efficient, more productive and would be rapidly embraced by all those involved, improving team morale and performance with absolutely no downside.
So why on earth do businesses still share important documents by email? Because it’s quick, because it’s easy, and because it’s familiar and they don’t recognise or feel the pain.
Then first ‘unfelt’ pain is that email is inherently insecure, it can be hacked, intercepted, incorrectly addressed, inappropriately forwarded and read by just about anybody. The pain concerned will only come after an important document is leaked or lost or simply overlooked.
It’s astonishingly inefficient, that important document could be anywhere, but invariably will be buried at the bottom of somebody’s, or several peoples inbox or junk mail.
It’s un-collaborative. Essentially it’s person-to-person communication, people who are copied in are done so in an unstructured and haphazard way.
Copy enough people in and surely the right person or the relevant person will pick it up and provide any necessary information.
A scattergun approach to collaboration if ever there was one.
Online collaboration platforms, allow you to share your documents securely with exactly who you want to share them with.
People are not bombarded with unnecessary communications (which they will invariably ignore) because they are only notified about documents that are truly necessary and relevant to the job they are doing.
The communication is encrypted and secure, with no need to worry about the size of attachments as the information is communicated via secure link rather than file attachment.
A central repository, or Common Data Environment, means that everybody knows where everything is. “A place for everything, and everything in its place” becomes the way things are rather than simply an aspiration.
Sometimes, businesses need to stop, take a moment, look at themselves and identify the pain or pressure points within.
