The proliferation of business software is a good thing — but it makes sharing difficult

The best tools for the job

Some of us remember when the only thing it took to prepare business information was a spreadsheet (Excel or Lotus) and a slideshow (PowerPoint). In the rare event that your interlocutors appreciated long copy, you might use Word.

The material — typically in one or two universal formats — would then be shared via CD or memory stick, or email. Sometimes a courier on a bike would deliver it.

Fortunately those days are behind us. And gone with them is the era of constrained thinking; where everything fitted neatly on a “deck” or could be reduced to a P&L forecast.

Today, businesses have access to an ever-growing number of tools designed to make work easier, faster, and more efficient. There are specialist tools for project management, product management, and financial modelling; there are a wide range of tools creating slides, videos, charts, renders and diagrams; and there are a whole host of tools that help people manage their stuff and track how they are doing. That’s before we get into the dashboards that sit at the top of CRM, financial management, software analytics, marketing and advertising.

I’m going to stick my neck out here and say that the broad market of such business tools is a good thing. Consolidation into a couple of formats and systems — while convenient for IT Dictators — can only lead to stilted thinking and awkward processes. In fact we are fast approaching a “free market” for business tools where, one would hope, the best tools for the job will generally float to the top, and further innovation will be rewarded.

Now to the sharing part

There’s a but and it’s unfortunately a big one. The plethora of the tools, platforms and formats that we use to create stuff has served us well. But when the time comes to share, multi-modal information is at a disadvantage.

Your information is spread across several different formats — and assuming at least some of them are cloud based — a variety of places too.

Of course, many, if not most, business tools facilitate collaboration inside their own ecosystems. And you can usually share the material individually with a “publish” rather than “collaborate” setting — either via a dark link (public but non-guessable) or via a unique link (which requires authentication by the viewer). The trouble is that by virtue of being point solutions, none of these tools has the whole story, so if you share it directly, you also need to share something else.

Which leads us to the search for a unifier.

On this topic there are a few schools of thought.

1. Standardise — everything is either exported or downloaded into a pdf format. A bundle of these pdf files can then be shared via a combination of Dropbox, Google and email.
2. Re-write the content — take the essence of the material and literally re-type it into a standard tool, typically Google Slides or Microsoft Powerpoint. I’ve found cases of Atlassian Confluence being used for this purpose too.
3. Screenshot and Copy/Paste — as above, but based on images rather than text. Material is un-editable, and the original source is somewhere else, so tweaks are difficult.
4. Put links to different sources somewhere — unfortunately this just looks ugly. You can pop links into a page in Confluence, Notion, ClickUp, Google Docs or PowerPoint. But who wants an ugly page of links? And there’s always that niggling worry about whether they are still working (or even if they go to the right thing!)

IT Dictators and the rise of Shadow IT

One response to the sharing problem is to declare that the business is a Microsoft, Atlassian or Google shop, and that everything must be done through one of these product suites. Good luck with that. A lowest common denominator approach to how people spend their time will always be resisted.

The phenomenon of so-called “Shadow IT” describes the way that anyone with a credit card can start buying software like an IT department. But many tools can be used individually for free, with no oversight at all. Team members may begin to use their own preferred tools, often without the knowledge or approval of the official channels.

Outright bans on business tools are extreme — and dangerous. A problem driven underground can simply get worse, as people start to hide the fact that they are using tools, making oversight even more difficult. This in turn can create security risks and make it difficult for the business to maintain control over its data and operations. The problem of “orphaned information” is frequently the result, where a beautiful diagram appears in a presentation and no one will admit to owning the original.

The elusive superapp for business productivity

We’ve seen a few attempts at this. And despite fantastic products like ClickUp (which do a lot of things really well), I suggest that the most likely quarter from something like a productivity superapp may emerge is Microsoft. The combination of familiarity (they literally designed how we ran our businesses in the 1990s); massive development capability; and unprecedented install base, means that they are well-placed.

But I don’t think it will quite work. As noted above, the old model of a business on a PowerPoint or reduced to a spreadsheet was always going to be a square peg in a round hole. And after having a taste of something better, I don’t think that the enthusiasm for other tools shows any sign of going away. Besides, it is simply outside the boundaries of credibility that Microsoft would acquire all the tools in any vertical. (Imagine getting a PowerBI-Tableau merger through the EU regulator!) There will continue to be space for new innovations (many of which Microsoft won’t think of), and there will always be niche use-cases that mainstream tech companies won’t capture.

Headless information and APIs

Another idea is that information will become ‘headless’ — ie divorced from how it is displayed — and that, reduced to data, it will just flow to wherever it’s needed. Maybe this is the final frontier, but I remain unconvinced and it is nowhere in sight. (Also, how boring would that world be?)

Another way?

Modern business tools can be incredibly powerful aids to efficiency and productivity. They are here to stay and we are mad not to use them. But to take a reductive approach where they are flattened down into pdf files or images is destructive. Users want other ways of sharing the output of these tools without the rework.

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#information_assembled