Heritage is always a tricky subject in modern cities, with one person’s culturally significant building being another person’s eyesore. It’s useful to think about your business systems in the same way, and the role of heritage in achieving the best result for your business.
The use of spreadsheets for your office and business management system is akin to the buildings that an architect might refer to as heritage, and we have three options in considering where our kind of heritage belongs.
This raises a serious question around the cost of preserving systems that no longer perform. In financial climates where bottom lines and profits are fundamental to survival, is it sensible to have a “but it’s what we have always done” attitude and put convention before your business's survival?
Implementing a new system is a major challenge and lack of time is the limiting factor in addressing it. The choice to preserve a heritage system will be at the direct expense of productivity and cash flow (both are essential for increases in profits in any business).
Preserving the old system for convenience sake will develop into a habit that becomes unaffordable.
That isn't to say that there is no value in well known, already implemented office systems, but rather that a successful business can't have everything - you cannot continue to persevere with the old because it’s easier than implementing the new, and miraculously see the growth and business success that you want and need.
Running a business is fundamentally about making a profit, and whether the systems that you have in place make this happen should be the ultimate measure of their value. If a ‘heritage’ office system can perform to current software solution capabilities, then it remains appropriate and is more than a ‘museum piece’. However, this is not often the case without substantial, and often complicated, levels of alterations and adjustments that will upset previous accounts and confuse any new staff that come into your business.
The irony is that ‘heritage’ office systems, and their capacity for continued business use, will require alterations, updates, and modifications to keep them performing. This is inversely related to their ‘heritage value’ (their convenient, traditional, well known, already established features). The more you try to update and expand your traditional system as your business develops, the more confusing and complicated they will become and the more hours and work will slip through the net.
Systems should be evaluated on how well they get the job done, and not preserved purely for convenience and because of other priorities. As today’s businesses compete on a constantly expanding playing field, that is at once local, national, and international, ensuring that your basic systems are operating as efficiently as possible and making productivity as high as it can be will put you ahead of the pack.
Undeniably, and by definition, heritage is about the past. The future of your business should be built through innovation and profitability, and now you need systems that respond to these needs.