Every Company Has an Undiagnosed ‘Last Mile’ Problem
We’re drowning in business operations apps. So why isn’t anything easier?
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Imagine the following. It’s 4 p.m. on a Friday, and the client project your account manager has been working on all afternoon is almost finished. She’s already completed 80% of the work; all she needs to do is confirm deployment with engineering, get sign-off from legal on the contract, and confirm final logistics with you, the VP of Customer Success, to whom she reports. Then she’ll be able to close her laptop, leave the office, and return home to her family for the weekend.
Unfortunately, that’s just not how things work today. The people she needs to complete these last steps work in separate, siloed platforms. Her director of legal ops only uses email; the engineer she’s been working with operates in Jira; and your team works in Salesforce. Because these packaged applications can’t communicate with or adapt to each other — they, in fact, weren’t designed to be adaptive at all — the onus of orchestrating this final 20% of collaboration falls squarely on her.
Why is this a problem? Well, for as technically powerful as these applications are, trying to use them collaboratively requires a beguiling amount of human effort. Across a veritable honeycomb of open browser tabs and blinking application windows, employees are forced to chase follow-ups, pester colleagues for signatures, update a variety of systems, and manually input pages of data into CRMs. All told, it’s remarkably inefficient, not to mention draining. By the time your manager of customer success has finally updated all of these systems and coerced all the various stakeholders to complete their necessary functions, it’s 7 p.m. Her partner — at home with the kids — is upset. Because you wanted to ship the completed project to the client by EOD, you’re also annoyed; the company has lost money. And as she closes her laptop for the night, she, too, feels resentment, both for the operational inadequacy of the applications you buy, and for the expectation that she has to be the one to compensate for their limitations.
