Is your business relying on outdated IT workarounds?

Written by Mark Dodds from Compex IT 

I reckon most businesses have at least a few IT workarounds that have been around so long nobody even questions them anymore.

You know the sort of thing...

“Ask Sarah, she knows how to do it.”

“You have to export it to Excel first.”

“Don't save it there, use the other folder.”

“Just email it to yourself.”

Or my personal favourite, “Restart it twice and it normally works.”

At some point, somebody came up with these little fixes to get around a problem. They were probably only meant to be temporary, but three years later they're still being used, and new employees are being taught them as though they're part of the official process.

The strange thing is that nobody really notices anymore. Something that was originally a problem has gradually become just another part of the working day.

How temporary fixes become permanent

Most workarounds start for a perfectly sensible reason. A system doesn't quite do what somebody needs it to do, so they find another way. It works well enough, everyone gets on with their day, and nobody gives it much more thought.

Fair enough. Businesses have work to do, and people can't stop everything whenever technology decides to be awkward.

The trouble comes when that temporary fix never gets looked at again.

Six months later, five people are using it. A year later, somebody is showing a new starter how to do it. Before long, it's become the accepted way of working, even though nobody can remember why it was necessary in the first place.

One workaround probably isn't going to cause much trouble. But how many businesses genuinely have just one?

There's the spreadsheet somebody has to update manually every Friday. The files stored across three different locations because nobody is quite sure which folder is the right one. The information that gets copied from one system into another because the two don't talk to each other.

And then there's the shared login that was set up years ago because it was easier than creating separate accounts. That one comes with a few security headaches as well.

Individually, these things might only cost someone five or ten minutes. Multiply that across 20, 30 or 50 employees, though, and you're potentially losing a surprising amount of time to tasks that nobody particularly wants to be doing.

The problems nobody bothers reporting

One thing I've noticed is that people are usually pretty good at reporting technology when it stops working completely.

If nobody can access their emails, you'll hear about it. If the internet goes down, you can guarantee somebody will be straight on the phone.

But what about the things that work, just not particularly well?

People don't tend to raise support tickets because it takes them an extra ten minutes to put a report together. They rarely complain about having to search through several folders to find a document, especially if they've been doing it that way for years.

Instead, they adapt. They find shortcuts, create spreadsheets, save things somewhere else or ask the same colleague for help every time.

Eventually, they stop thinking of these things as problems. They're simply how the job gets done.

And that's where businesses can miss something important. Management might think the technology is working perfectly well because nobody is complaining, while employees are quietly spending hours every week working around it.

Ask someone, “Does your IT work?” and they'll probably say yes.

Ask them, “What do you have to do every day that seems unnecessarily complicated?” and I suspect you'll get a much more interesting answer.

'That's just how we've always done it'

This is a phrase that should probably raise a few questions whenever you hear it.

Sometimes there is a very good reason for doing something a particular way. I'm certainly not suggesting every process needs pulling apart just because it's been around for a while.

But it's worth finding out whether that reason still exists.

Perhaps the software has changed and the workaround isn't needed anymore. Maybe Microsoft 365 already includes something that could make the process easier, but nobody has realised. Or it could be that the business already pays for another system that would do the job without all the manual effort.

It's also worth remembering that processes which worked perfectly well when a business had eight employees might be a complete pain when there are 40.

Technology tends to grow alongside a business, but not always in a particularly organised way.

A new system gets introduced to solve one problem. Another application is added a year later. Somebody builds a spreadsheet to move information between the two, and everyone carries on.

None of those decisions was necessarily wrong at the time. In fact, they probably made perfect sense.

It's only when you look at everything together, a few years down the line, that you realise just how many extra steps people have picked up along the way.

Your IT doesn't have to be broken to be causing problems

When businesses think about IT issues, they naturally think about the obvious things. Servers going down, emails not working, internet connections dropping out or computers that take forever to start.

Those problems are frustrating, but at least everyone knows they exist.

I'm more interested in the smaller frustrations that tend to slip under the radar.

The employee who has to enter the same customer details into two different systems. The person who spends half an hour every Monday pulling together a report that could potentially be automated. Or the team that emails different versions of the same spreadsheet around and then has to work out which one is actually up to date.

There's also the process that only one person in the business understands. That's fine until they're on holiday, off sick or decide to leave.

None of these things necessarily looks like a traditional IT problem. There might not be anything technically broken at all.

But if your technology is making people do unnecessary work, surely it's worth finding out whether there's a better way?

That doesn't mean rushing out to buy another piece of software, either. Sometimes the answer is already sitting there in a system you're paying for.

One question worth asking your team

You don't need to commission a big technology review to start spotting these issues. In fact, I'd suggest beginning with something much simpler.

Ask your employees:

“What's the most annoying bit of technology or process you have to deal with during a normal working week?”

And give them a chance to think about it.

You might hear things like, “That takes ages”, “I've no idea why we still do it like that” or the slightly worrying, “Only James knows how that works.”

Those are exactly the answers I'd be paying attention to.

They tell you something that a list of support tickets probably won't. They show you where people have become so used to working around problems that they've stopped mentioning them.

Of course, not everything will be worth fixing. Some workarounds are perfectly reasonable, and changing a process can sometimes create more hassle than it solves.

But I wouldn't be surprised if most businesses could find at least one or two things that are wasting far more time than anyone realises.

And the nice thing is, improving those processes doesn't necessarily mean spending thousands on new technology.

Sometimes it's simply a case of looking at something you've been doing for years and asking, “Why on earth are we still doing it like that?”

You might be surprised by the answer.