If you owned a cleaning company, and your cleaner was working tirelessly with an old, broken broom, would you double their hours to ensure they swept all remaining crumbs, or would you simply buy them a vacuum cleaner? The latter is much more energy and financially efficient, of course. The ROI would certainly be higher. So why then, are companies wasting their employees’ time and energy with old, labor-intensive, and broken systems to complete critical processes when the options exist to optimize and automate these very same actions?
Perhaps in a time of economic uncertainty, where companies are cutting costs and expenses, and at worst, laying off their employees, it seems a ridiculous idea to invest scarce financial resources in internal development - in the ugly admin back office that no customer even sees. But should we not question, for a moment, that it might be more ridiculous to pay our valuable, human staff to complete tasks a tool could, in a fraction of the time?
To reign back in on a question that might conjure visions of a dystopian, post-human world in which we are held hostage by our too-artificially-intelligent, robotic bosses, let’s think about the things a computer cannot do:
This is, in fact, what you pay your highly-qualified, emotional, and skilled human employees to do. So is there some logic in letting a computer do what it is good at, to make space for your employees to grow, innovate and learn beyond what a computer could ever do?
Let me start with how it shouldn’t look, with a bugbear question of mine: how, in 2023, are enterprise-level companies, with hundreds, if not thousands, of employees and plenty of in-company technical know-how, still using complicated, vulnerable, and limited spreadsheet infrastructures to execute core processes?
Perhaps yes, time and money are exactly the problems that many companies are looking at when it comes to internal infrastructure.
Time and money isn’t a problem that can easily be solved overnight, but nevertheless, if we continue to only focus developer attention on customer-facing products, or custom-code intensive development, the metaphorical bucket will always be kicked down the year’s quarters to be focused on at a later date, if ever.
We dig into how they should look in our Internal Tools 101.
In a variety of ways, though it may sound cheesy, optimized internal tools are the key to scaling productivity and creativity: avoiding inefficient manual processes, ensuring proper and secure storage of critical data, optimizing onboarding, presenting clear and automated reports to encourage data-driven innovations - the list can go on.
Prioritizing solving internal problems in a company takes all that wasted energy and funnels it into the things that matter: the things that will grow and evolve the company and help it overcome the economic obstacles ahead of us. Important to note here is that while many well-established corporations and companies are dawdling on their internal development, the many startups who have adopted this philosophy to have efficient internal infrastructure as one of their principal focuses, are poised to overtake them.
Of course, we are. But then again, in our clients we see the transformations occurring in real-time, and we hear the satisfaction and relief of non-technical teams having their niggling issues solved, their repetitive processes automated, or their data finally safely workable. We get to observe the speed at which these startups and companies can grow.
We also see the incredible innovations occurring in the internal tool sphere, allowing companies to build even better and faster, and more reliably. We currently work exclusively with Retool because we recognize it stands at the forefront of these changes in the sector with the features and systems that matter most to companies and their development teams. If you are interested in Retool or considering investing in your internal tool infrastructure, send us a note on our contact page, and we’ll be in touch.
Read more about what kinds of apps are best to build in our Internal Tools 101 guide, or read our tips on Build vs Buy.
Bold Tech is a group of talented, capable developers who I regularly trust to help our customers build the apps they need, fast. Everyone I've put them in front of has given rave reviews!
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