Right tools for the job
Back in the day when soaps were new and sometimes watchable, one of the characters would wield a wrench as he saved the damsel in distress. Being brought up on spanners and spanner laws I would wince as the adjustable wrench was applied the wrong way, putting all the pressure on the movable jaw. Of course these were only actors but in real life it’s surprising how often a one size fits all approach is used to solve problems that really should be tackled with the correct tool.
This is pretty much the situation with cloud based software, it tries to be all things to all situations but of course every business has it’s USP which demands that the metaphorical wrench being used either doesn’t fit correctly or is used wrong.
People under pressure are hugely resourceful, and to get a job done will bend and twist the tools to this end, but, in doing so they invariably take many times longer to do the job than it could take if the right tool was used.
Tools have always played a big role in software design. When Unix™ was designed in the late 1960s it was borrowing from the long tradition of the tool kit. Where tools (commands) could be used individually or together to achieve an aim and the savvy operator could choose the best tools from the toolkit, put them together in the most efficient way to get speedy and accurate results.
Bespoke software is the next stage up from this. The software being designed for a specific business does the putting together of disparate commands so that the users don’t have to jump through hoops to get complex jobs done.
As an example a firm processing say, many self employed workers for many companies, like a recruitment agency for instance can use an off the shelf recruitment software solution which tries to do all things that a recruitment agency could want to do but find that because of their USP they do things slightly differently to the way the software was designed.
In the work around it takes two people a week to do a job which could be done using the right tools in half an hour by one person, saving the company thirty to sixty thousand pounds per year!
The proper software to do the job would cost a lot less than the salary and time of those doing the job and now they could be used to do other tasks within the company as they are freed up by using the correct tools for the job.
Just for fun, further information:
https://www.artofmanliness.com/lifestyle/gear/toolmanship-your-complete-guide-to-wrenches/