Everybody wants to improve, and every business wants to optimize. How can we make a product better? How can we streamline a process? With growth comes change, and every layer of every business must be flexible enough to move along with the change. This is apparent from the private sector to the public service.
Many are guilty of aiming for that one golden “cure-all”. Too many are eager to get out their checkbooks and buy a large, enterprise solution that they think will fix their issues. It sure looks nice, but they quickly find that it’s not going to work. When it’s all said and done, they find that in actuality it only standardized the top level, or promoted communication between disparate areas and processes that are still compiling data in an inconsistent manner. Balance is lost, and they lose site of the client mission. These solutions end up being a band-aid on a splinter. It does nothing to solve the root of the problem.
Why do businesses do this? It’s simple, really. Digging in to each individual area is difficult. It’s arduous. It’s painful. And, quite frankly, where’s the glory? Quite invisible, really. But, in order to enact an effective change, you have to start at the foundation. Change doesn’t happen from the top. Ground up. Understand that a good business is more than upper management and quick fixes.
In the end, if you were to rebuild or rework those basic lower level systems, you may find that you do not need that overarching expensive solution after all. This is the mindset we take in everything we do. It all comes back to what “Niyam” means: systematic, orderly, governed by rules. And all good systems start with a solid base.