If you do a simple search online, you’ll find many articles recommending this piece of software or another and telling you all about its features – what you’ll see much less often, however, are pieces talking about the reasons why you should update your software stack. Because let’s be honest, the business software world is pretty much well-established now, and there aren’t massive innovations month after month making it worthwhile to upgrade your systems every quarter. At the same time, as a business, you need to find ways to remain competitive and stay relevant – you can’t afford to stay behind when all your competitors adopt new technologies that make them more productive. You need to strike a balance between not wasting money regularly on useless upgrades and between not falling behind in major technologies and staying competitive and productive. This article will help you by giving you concrete signs and reasons you can use to be sure it is time for an upgrade:
#1 You’re Measurably Falling Behind Your Competitors
The most dangerous thing to a firm’s survival and growth is the competitors undercutting them in price or performance – you need to be innovative, smart, and efficient if you want your business to survive long term. This is why you need to always keep up with your competitors’ performance and strategy.
Usually, especially in established industries, it is really difficult to make the business process more efficient in such a way that you can undercut your competitors in a major way. One of the biggest ways, especially recently, businesses can improve their workflow and efficiency is through more digitization, better data processing, more use of online platforms, etc. In other words, most of the improvements occur in the digital space, and if you’re seeing one of your competitors becoming much more efficient, it is highly likely it is due to upgrading or installing new software. This is even truer for businesses who completely rely on the online space, for example. If you’re running product review sites and you’re falling behind, you can be sure it is related to the technologies used. Of course, there are many reasons why you could be falling behind your competitors, but this should act as a good sign to investigate further into your software systems.
#2 You Can’t Delegate Effectively
The business world is highly interconnected, and if you are running a growing and successful business, chances are that you’re regularly interacting with a lot of other businesses. Effective integration and delegation are the two key ingrediants of successful business management – you can’t do everything yourself and you shouldn’t do everything yourself: comparative advantage is real and you should be making use of it to outsource some of your tasks to bigger firms where they can do it cheaper and better.
All sectors use complex and up-to-date software systems to facilitate communication and delegation. If you’re finding that your software system is hindering your ability to do this and you need to add extra layers of compatibility, this means the system you’re using is behind the times and you need to upgrade. This is a very strong sign, too, because the enterprise sector is usually a decade or so behind the latest technologies used in Silicon Valley, and if you’re behind them, this usually means there are a lot of productivity and efficiency gains you can attain by upgrading.
#3 Your Business has Evolved Beyond the Software’s Capabilities
All businesses grow and evolve because those that don’t are most likely bankrupt. Twitter started out as a podcast platform, Facebook started out as a platform for rating how attractive girls at Harvard’s campus. Both have changed sufficiently during the last decade, and Facebook is still changing investing in multiple sectors and different industries. So, it is only natural, if not necessary, for your business to change and evolve with time. Sadly, your software system, no matter how flexible it is marketed to be, can’t evolve with you forever, and there comes a time that it’ll slow down your business down due to all the incompatibilities and workarounds. Cutting your losses early on and investing in a new software system would be much more efficient and less costly in the long run compared to keeping the software system and just patching it and building workarounds. Thankfully, due to globalization, you can hire talented software developers in Poland and all around the world inexpensively and be sure they’ll deliver high-quality products.
