Personal service and software

There are actually some tasks in life which are still better delivered by personal service. It isn’t true that everything is delivered better by machine, or a big corporate.

As many business gurus will tell you, a company should only get big if there is a business reason for it to get big – ie it is more efficient that way.

There are costs of being big (more management layers and meetings). In terms of employees, people will usually be more attracted to working for a big company (I don’t know why) and big companies will be better at getting value out of their staff. But employees will often – or usually – be more motivated working for smaller companies or even working for themselves.

And so we come to the software industry.

It isn’t hard to find a software user who doesn’t like their software.

And we get raging debates about whose fault this was. Is the user ‘resistant to change’? Was the user not involved in the discussion about how the software should be built (or did they only realise what they needed after it was built?) Is the user too lazy to work out a new user interface? Is the software company unwilling to provide better support (and who is going to pay for it)?

There is a better solution – have a small company in between the big software company and the big company user – and the small company is paid a monthly fee to provide a personal service, be available to solve problems, and reconfigure the software on the fly (which is possible, since it is made from low-code) if the user realises that their requirements were different to what they thought.

The small company uses empathy and imagination to work out what the user needs (even if the user can’t describe it).

This is another angle to our ‘Software for Domain Experts’ business model.