Growing companies usually experience growing pains, and technology can be one of the most painful.
An off-the-shelf accounting or customer relationship management software program that works fine for a company with a staff of 40 might not cut it when staff levels grow into the hundreds.
And, as business consultants Neal Chaudhary and James McGregor of Tacit Management Consulting discovered, companies in growth mode sometimes end up with the wrong technology, which can be costly.
“We worked on a lot of project rescue missions,” Chaudhary said. “We were brought in to clean up the mess. We started looking at ‘why did these projects go off the rail?’ There’s a whole range of issues, but one of the common themes was companies selected the wrong software.”
Chaudhary and McGregor founded Tacit Management to provide specialized consulting to help companies find the right enterprise software for their business needs – something that is often beyond the scope of a company’s IT department.
A company looking for a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, for example, might simply assign the task of getting a new one to someone internally. Without a comprehensive knowledge of all the available products, the employee could end up buying the system with the best sales pitch but not the best performance.
Tacit is agnostic when it comes to recommending software, which these days come in two main flavours: traditional software installed on desktops or software as a service (SaaS).
Before they even start looking at the technology, Tacit consultants assess the company’s business objectives. One decision companies have to make these days is whether to go with traditional software or SaaS, which can be cheaper and easier to manage.
But it’s not always the best solution for smaller businesses, said Des Dougan, principal of Dougan Consulting Group.
His company provides IT support for small business. He said one client tried Salesforce, which turned out to be too costly for her needs, and she ended up using a Google Docs spreadsheets.
Tacit also had one client who considered a SaaS approach but then decided against it – but not because of the cost.
When an SaaS service is cloud-hosted, a company’s data could end up in a U.S. data centre and therefore fall under the Patriot Act, which gives the U.S. government powers of access over their data.
“Many of small-business owners are concerned about having their data stored outside the boundaries of Canada,” Dougan said, “because if it’s stored in the U.S. or is in control of a U.S. company, then if the U.S. government decides it wants to investigate either that company or one of that company’s clients, [it] could have access to Canadian data.”
Dougan added that cloud-based services with data stored only in Canada are usually more expensive. •
