Two distinctly different efforts, requiring two distinctly different skill sets. When it comes to systems, procedures, methods, and executing, the tools are also different. In our marketplace, the small to mid-size business(SMB), frequently the same people are responsible for both efforts.
Running the business is generally a “concrete”, tangible process: make sales, process orders, deliver the goods and collect the money. Lots of minutia, requiring day-to-day attention and an eye on the details. Whether product or service, these same basics of business apply.
Managing the organization requires much more of the human, cerebral touch. Articulating a Vision, formulating strategy, building goal systems, managing group and individual performance, are people centric, conceptual processes.
How does someone with a linear thought process, that is, someone who is comfortable with tangibles and facile with spreadsheets and the like, effectively deal with the challenges of visioning, conceptualizing a picture of some future state? How do they handle the fuzzy process of formulating a strategic direction to support that vision? In our experience, not very well. Conversely, the conceptual thinker is hard pressed to steep him or herself in what they may consider the mundane activity of financial controls or production statistics. This disparity is one of the primary obstacles to growth in entrepreneurial organizations. Few people are well equipped to handle both domains well. Too much “stuff” begins to fall through the cracks.
There are no easy solutions, however, there are approaches which mitigate the negative impact on the organization and don't leave too much detritus lying around.
Support for these inextricably intertwined activities requires the support of financial, customer, vendor, sales and a plethora of other industry specific systems. Today, much of the painful gathering of data and crunching of numbers is handled by software. They can be stand alone “point specific” applications, i.e. financial/accounting, sales/CRM, HR, project management, etc. Or they may be part of a suite of applications designed to seamlessly interface with each other. They can be accessed either from the organizations own servers, from the users' desktops, or via the web as Software as a Service (SaaS).
Our unscientific research turned up more choices than one needs for “running the business” functions. And they are available in myriad flavors, from single user to enterprise versions; from desktop based to SaaS.
The breadth and depth of alternatives is limited, however, when one seeks to find electronic tools for “managing the organization”. The types of access are the same; the choices are few. From our perspective as organization consultants, we wonder why so little attention is paid to the “up-front, decide who we are and what we want to achieve” aspect of business in general.
There's plenty of talk about helping sales people track their activities; about accounting outcomes; about shop floor/office productivity; about customer service. There's comparatively little said or done about high level, future thinking, leadership focused solutions in the software domain. We offer one solution. The world of business needs more.
-RSL
