Software is still “eating the world” as Marc Andreessen, the legendary founder of Netscape, board member of Facebook (Meta) and the a16z venture capital fund put it back in 2011. How software applications are built and how they are run today in 2024 has continued to evolve rapidly over the last decade and more*. Yet only some of that goodness has filtered its way down to your average small to medium sized business; which in the UK are defined as having less than 250 employees.

In fact, your average “one-man-band” or “mom and pop” micro business of less than 10 persons is probably better off and more digitally enabled than your typical 50 - 5,000 person company. The smallest businesses are able to leverage remarkable productivity gains and new sales opportunities just by using a handful of the myriad consumer productivity apps like Email, Calendar, WhatsApp that they can access for free on their smartphones, tablets and laptops and selling via Amazon, eBay, Checkatrade or their own logo Ionos or Wordpress website if they are super sophisticated!!

Outside of the technology industries (eg. software and electronics companies), large businesses (250 employees or more) and major corporations of up to 5,000 people (arbitrary number! sometimes more; Tesco has 300,000+ employees!!) really struggle. Most have invested in business software over the last decade, but continue to be underwhelmed by the result.

What are the issues?

Many of the largest corporations got burnt by expensive IT consulting engagements that ran over budget and timeframe; or never delivered the benefits promised; or could not adapt fast enough as the business environment changed - eg. the global financial crisis of 2008+, or more recently, the Covid pandemic 2020+ and the Ukraine war 2022+ coupled with China-USA dis-engagement, sky-rocketing energy prices and supply chain disruptions.  

For the larger corporations, they might have budget for high profile internal Accounting, Human Resources Supply Chain Management projects**, or customer facing consumer apps or mobile sales/service workforce productivity apps. But they almost certainly don’t have the budget for lower priority apps that require data entry/internal process automation, reporting and archiving for audit/compliance; especially if an off-the-shelf app from their usual supplier doesn’t already exist.

For the smaller large businesses, perhaps they:

• Don’t have the budget 
• Don’t have a dedicated IT team
• Depend on certain non-specialist “have-a-go-heroes” to multi-task

In both these scenarios Excel and Email still largely predominate for coordinating things like:

• Supplier onboarding
• Employee surveys
• Test result sharing
• Health & safety audits
• Customs documentation
• And many other scenarios

This means data gets silo’d in 10s or 100s of different places and it becomes a nightmare to secure, report, update, manage, archive as it has not been inputted in standardised formats into a centrally managed database

What’s changed with building software apps since 2011?

• The underlying tech :: Cloud Computing and Containers >> systems that scale rapidly (up and down) 
• The payment model :: Software-as-a-Service >> no need to pay for it all up-front (as Capex), you pay for what you use (as Opex) 
• The design :: User Centric Design >> diffusion of methods pioneered by the consumer mega brands like Apple, Amazon, BBC to the world of work and business apps
• The build/run practices :: Agile and DevOps >> developer teams build and test apps fast and deploy new incremental features rapidly based on real-world market feedback
• The integration :: APIs and Microservices >> connecting to other internal/external systems via a published set of standard interfaces is SO much easier than what existed previously
• And the list goes on!

What’s wrong with the software?

The foundational building blocks of the software apps that they’ve bought were designed 20+ years ago. Oracle and SAP are dinosaurs founded in the 1970s. Salesforce.com was established in 1999 and its platform foundations were built out in the 2000s; yet compared to any more recently founded truly cloud-native company***, its apps look dated and run slow; just try applying for a job there to find out!!!  Salesforce is an interesting example and in many ways a victim of its own success as it begins to wrestle with the challenges that the software app dinosaurs have been challenged by since the 1990s (and before, if you’re IBM!).  How do you continue to innovate and offer new services yet at the same time look after your existing customers who have been running your apps for several years and remember the disruption and cost entailed when their new system was first implemented or the last time their significant software vendor required them to make a major upgrade. Salesforce has enjoyed truly stellar growth but they continue to operate a single cloud platform for all their 1,000s of customers (in the CRM space) and that means massive complexity everytime they need to update any of their underlying services. How do you make sure that you do not disrupt any of your existing customers still running previous versions of your software? It’s really not easy. Hence, the pace of innovation at Salesforce (and other companies like them) as seen by outside observers (like me or other commentators) slows. Which means they can only continue to grow fast by acquisition - which again only further adds to future complexity!!!

How is the new software of the 2020s different?

A myriad of new “born-in-the-cloud” business apps have launched over the last decade covering key functions that every business needs from invoicing, accounting, payments, supply chain planning, manufacturing, inventory, distribution, sales, service etc… 

Examples include: Wave, Xero, Infor, Odoo, Monday, Intercom

What the companies behind them have in common is that they have little or no legacy. They can use all the new technologies and techniques highlighted above (and others) and build beautiful software apps really fast and make sure they are N-ways scalable and easy to connect to other systems. Security is designed in from Day 0 (although the battle against the fraudsters continues for everyone). But it’s because they have no legacy, their Technical Debt is manageable and they can continue to innovate and add new features (and customers) at pace.

And then there are the building-block software tools (Low code / No code platforms) that let your own teams build pretty good software apps fast; no programming experience required. Softools is one of those and is one of the best!!!  And you can use these to build loads of super efficient cost/quality/risk/time saving apps that you were otherwise managing with Excel and Email.

At Noremo we can help you make this transition.

Please get in touch to find out how.

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Photo credit: Jean Wimmerlin‍

jean wimmerlin (@jwimmerli) | Unsplash Photo Community