But they don't try to "buck the system" just for the sake of it.
Overcoming process inertia is profoundly expensive and often demoralizing to teams. The project budget for a new system is often pitched as vendor price plus some internal oversight, but this fails to represent the cost of the project exactly because adapting the workflow of a whole division or organization inevitavly costs some multiple of that budget while vendors, consultants, and internal spearheaders all pretend it's negligible.
You're right, ultimately, that failure to adapt is the final damning issue in many of these projects but the root cause of the failure is often that nobody sincerely quantified just how costly and disruptive it will be.
I'm in small and medium business. A lot of homegrown and unique processes that are just dandy. I mean it they're fine. But when faced by things like standard GAAP accounting processes, or even EDI. You can't argue with it. You can't tell walmart oh no well actually I didn't mean to send that 850. It costs you money. You can't willy nilly charge credit cards anymore. Its just life. It makes it hard for them not just in IT but also to hire new people or replace retiring ones. Only Bob knew this process.
What makes the clients we work with great and unique and what I love is the products they make or the problems they solve for customers, but they're not tech companies or banks. The ones who succeed are the ones who focus on thier core value and core skills and not random accounting process X Y or Z.
I work specifically with small and medium businesses too, and can echo that sentiment! I'd love to know more about what you do. Love working with SMBs but don't know a lot of other people in that space.
Its nice. It's certainly not high faluting as a lot of HN jobs but I make good money for where I live, our clients are mostly regional but a lot of the 50 states have customers over the years. Mostly we work on implementing and servicing ERP systems. Our differentiator is our skillet in integrations and holistic problem solving. Since the ERP sits in the middle of almost every IT venn diagram, we run into new tech on a weekly basis.
Besides the ERP consulting bit we sell niche solutions in our product space. Mostly comms(EDI, ecommerce,etc) or payroll/bookkeeping addons.
Especially when the processes are beholden to certification authorities (say the FAA, FDA, etc) because the processes has to be approved and cert'd from the agencies. That's a fun one to unravel and co-ordinate getting changed in a timeframe keeping higher managements super optimistic timeframe that they decided to commit to, say the board, on.
Overcoming process inertia is profoundly expensive and often demoralizing to teams. The project budget for a new system is often pitched as vendor price plus some internal oversight, but this fails to represent the cost of the project exactly because adapting the workflow of a whole division or organization inevitavly costs some multiple of that budget while vendors, consultants, and internal spearheaders all pretend it's negligible.
You're right, ultimately, that failure to adapt is the final damning issue in many of these projects but the root cause of the failure is often that nobody sincerely quantified just how costly and disruptive it will be.