The enthusiasm of a new business year ahead often includes plans of improving business systems or implementing new ones and rightfully so!
Well implemented, intelligent software solutions can really set you apart from competitors, speed up customer outcomes and create valuable insights.
But getting it right isn’t always straightforward and if approached with haste the desired outcomes can be a long way off.
1. Simplify Before You Automate
All growing businesses seek automation. Unattended processes that happen without human interaction or intervention. Automation saves time, reduces errors and reduces overheads. It’s a scaling multiplier!
But you can’t automate disparate processes and you can’t easily automate complex processes with too many decision points.
Before you even begin to identify automation opportunities you need to standardise and simplify!
- Review your processes and consolidate where possible.
- Refine steps within your processes, even removing steps entirely.
- Document before you build. If you can’t document them, they are too complex!
- Focus on clarity over cleverness. Simplicity rules above all else.
By reviewing and simplifying before trying to automate you may very well identify areas that don’t even require automation.
Over-automation is also a trap, so don’t focus on trying to automate every process, start with the most common and repeated processes.
2. Centralise Your Core Data
You don’t need all your data in one place or one single system, but you absolutely must centralise the important and shared data.
Be it customer data, financial data or operational data, if the information is used by multiple teams or across departments you need to centralise this information into a single source.
Scattered data creates friction everywhere!
Consider smart integration solutions to move the important data between systems, this reduces duplicate data entry and makes reporting easier and more trusted which leads to improved decision making.
Invest in software that supports integration and doesn't create a barrier for it. Even if integration is a future consideration, don’t hamstring yourself now by implementing software that is not easily extensible.
And just because it’s 2026 and I need to include something about AI for the internet to think this is relevant. AI solutions require clean, centralised data sources.
Whether you are wrapping a commercial model or considering training your own model, you need your data clean, accessible and reliable for AI to have any chance of being useful.
3. Build Systems for Humans
Even though it may feel like us mere mortals might be getting phased out of the tech world, it hasn't happened yet and it likely won’t happen in your business in 2026.
So please consider the smart and capable people you have around you that will interact with your systems daily.
If your team has no idea how to manage their processes within the software solutions they will not be productive or worse yet they will be down right disruptive.
Include key people as early as possible and get their buy-in when building new systems.
- Prioritise usability and user adoption
- Reduce clicks where possible (sounds small, but it matters!)
- Provide training that is scenario or outcome focused, not just software features.
Build your systems for the humans so you can automate them out of the process and free them up to work on higher value tasks!
4. Make Reporting Actionable, Not Decorative
One of the questions that we are always asked when implementing new business systems is ‘can you build us a dashboard?'.
And yes, of course we can, building the report is the easy part, its understanding what to measure and how to measure it that is far more challenging to get right.
Generally speaking most businesses only need a handful of key metrics to empower quality decision making. Over-baked dashboards with hundreds of data points, gauges and KPI meters rarely add true value.
It’s that one report or that one simple dashboard that tells a real story that managers and executives will keep coming back to.
- Focus on a small number of meaningful metrics
- Tie reporting to actions and accountability
- Avoid those metrics that ‘feel good’ but don’t help decision making
- Review reports, weekly, if not daily. The ones that are useful will quickly stand out.
You can always expand your reporting capabilities, but if you go too deep before your data and systems are ready you can generate very misleading information.
A few, truly accurate reports will always be your most valuable data asset.
5. Treat Your Systems Like a Compounding Asset
Your system is never finished.
Yes, you may have completed the initial implementation and the software is beginning to form a core part of your business workflow but it's the continuous improvement of these systems over a long period of time that generates the biggest return.
- Review systems regularly and evaluate what's working and what needs improving
- Invest consistently instead of reacting in crisis
- Plan for scale early and document decisions and changes in detail
It's also important to invest in partnerships with experts to make the journey smoother, remove risk and help achieve your outcomes.
But you cannot outsource your success! Your systems and their success is your responsibility. The right partnership can make a world of difference but it requires dedication and attention from within your own organisation to truly make any software project a success.
