Your IT staff or MSP improved your IT infrastructure to operate securely and safely. You made workplace changes. All good stuff. But your IT and facility infrastructure only withdraws cash from your bank account and produces heat.

Business results come from your employees using tools, equipment, and your main business application to deliver value for which your customers pay or to cause prospects to become customers.

W. Edwards Deming: “When something goes wrong, chances are 85% that it is the fault of the system, and 15% that the individual worker is at fault.”

What might be faults in your vital business app? Is it confusing and hard to use? Is it labor-intensive and error-prone? Is it a frequent cause of rework? Is it unreliable? Is it poorly supported by its supplier? Is it missing features needed for your growth plan? Does it interact poorly or not at all with other applications and tools? Is it inadequate or unavailable to key users working from home?

You and your people know about many of those problems. Some you’ve lived with for a long time. “Yeah, it’s stupid, but it only takes me 2-3 minutes.” Some became apparent as you adapted to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Perhaps it would be a good idea to make a detailed list of the problems. If you got some of them fixed, would that improve customer satisfaction? Improve your competitiveness? Help you reposition the company for growth? Reduce rework? Reduce cost? Improve productivity? Improve morale? Let you sleep a bit better at night?

You don’t need to go for perfection. If you can fix a few things easily and doing so has big impact, declare victory. Or look on it as a journey and get something fixed every month or quarter, some perhaps by an outside contractor.

Or maybe you will conclude that the business application needs major surgery or replacement. Do what’s worthwhile.