Wanting to have your cake AND eat it

Posted by Riki Dolby on March 18, 2023

It is often said that one of the joys of working in a start up is the lack of process or formality, which enables every member of the team to just get on with the job.  In essence in a small business you don’t have or need complex processes because people can just talk to each other.

Large enterprises, on the other hand, have challenges that come intrinsically from their scale including communication, coordination, control and consistency issues. 

As small businesses grow they often put piecemeal solutions in place to solve specific problems – because deploying too much process control too soon in a business can be devastating (see blog – Everyone is different).  This focused process work, often with specialised tools dedicated to serving only a handful of types of users, has great benefits.  Being able to pick the best tool for a specific problem or one that works best for a specific team, has great advantages in terms of suitability, engagement and effectiveness.

However as growth continues this can bring positive and negative consequences. Heterogenous tooling is more complex to manage and certainly presents a challenge to the operations and compliance teams in their efforts to ensure best practice and good governance.  It is also unnecessarily complicated to get good holistic business metrics and KPIs from a wide selection of very different tools.

For many successful businesses, there comes a time either after being acquired or once they cross a critical size threshold where they feel they have to take the plunge and migrate to a consistent toolset.  For many this will be the start of a commitment to one of the big system players like SAP, IBM or Oracle. 

There is however huge pain and disruption in migrating business tooling.  And the general philosophy for most enterprise tools is that you must fully commit and enter their world.  Specialist and optimised tools are dropped and those use cases are forced into a more generic system.  This creates both inefficiencies and frustration for the teams as the wider company benefits are prioritised over the needs of the individual teams.

Clearly from a governance and reporting perspective this massively simplifies things but it comes at a cost both in migration and beyond.  This integration cost is arguably one of the largest reasons acquisitions can fail, both in terms of profitability and retention of critical staff which are what made the acquisition desirable in the first place.

At ApprovalDeck we believe that SMEs should not have to compromise on their choice of tools in the cause of good governance.  So our focus is to overlay approvals, compliance, and record keeping and analysis onto the tools that teams are already familiar with and using effectively.  With this approach we believe that many business can significantly delay or possibly even avoid entirely the trauma of migration to a one-size-fits-all, but badly, solution.

We look forward to some of our customers being acquired and the new parent company being jealous of the smaller businesses tooling and deciding that no changes to business governance or compliance procedures are needed because everything is provably well managed.