I often use the saying, “There is only one good reason to spend money on technology. And that’s to make more money.”
That in and of itself is a strategy. Our customers are not hobbyists or technology enthusiasts; they are business owners, trying to make money. Fortunately, or unfortunately, it is all too common for businesses to not understand that making decisions based on acquisition cost (the cost to make an initial purchase) is tactical. It frequently leads to decisions that create silos, disconnected systems, and operational chaos.
Business strategy is the antidote to those challenges. As I’ve mentioned before, Process Distillery is both the name of our company but also our methodology. It is our approach to breaking down complex business systems, but more specifically, it allows you to understand the relationship of one application to another and how all of the applications in an environment allow the data flow back to the financial statement. In case you’re not familiar with the financial statement, it is your profit and loss and balance sheet, and it is the ultimate scorecard of how your company is doing.
Any system that doesn’t align the data to the financial statement is by definition misaligned. What I see over and over and over again are decision after decision after decision to implement systems that don’t talk and ultimately don’t flow back to the financial statement. Why is that done? Most technologists have no idea what a financial statement is or why it’s important to the business. They also most commonly don’t care. They think of hardware and software in two-dimensional terms rather than including the third dimension, which is the desired result. You see the desired action, system, user interface, and platform, or nothing but tools. It’s no different than a hammer. You can pound a lot of nails into wood and never build anything. Failing to align your technology to your business strategy, and ultimately your financial statements, just adds extra steps to the process that typically have to be manually accomplished and frequently eliminates whatever efficiencies you were trying to accomplish. The reason this is allowed to happen is usually because it simply moves inefficiency from one department to another, making it someone else’s problem.
At Process Distillery, we are committed to helping companies understand and execute on their business strategy by deploying tactics that are aligned and symbiotic to the desired result. While many customers call their desired result different things, for us, it just comes down to helping them make more money. Because that’s ultimately why they are in business.