Why Digitalization Is Essential for SMEs Today

Digitalization is not a technology trend. It is a business decision. The question is not whether you want to look modern. The question is whether the people who deal with your company can finish what they came to do.

Digitalization is not the future, it is the present

Plenty of small and mid-sized companies still treat digitalization as one big leap they will take at some point. Meanwhile the bar for what counts as ordinary, unremarkable operation has moved on its own. Nobody fell behind. Everyone around the company simply started working differently.

That is what turns this from an advantage into a baseline. An advantage is what makes you stand out. A baseline is what gets noticed when it is missing. Digital operation at a small company sits firmly in the second group: nobody compliments you for having it, and everybody notices when you do not.

The bar is not set inside your office, either. It is set in four places, all of them outside the company: at your customer, at your next hire, at the partners you exchange paperwork with, and at the institutions that ask you for documents. Walking through those four is the fastest way to see what actually counts as a baseline today.

Your customer is already digital, whether you are or not

A customer emails what they want. Two weeks later they call to ask where it stands. Whoever picks up the phone does not know, because a different colleague handled the thread, and the thread lives in that colleague's inbox. So the customer explains the whole thing again.

What they see in that moment is not that you lack a system. What they see is that they had to say the same thing twice. That does not lose you the account the first time, or the second. What it loses is the next question: instead of calling you, they now copy someone else in as well, just to be safe.

On your side every one of these rounds takes up two people: the one who answered the phone, and the one who knows the answer. On theirs it costs a portion of patience. Neither one ever shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it can go unnoticed for years.

The expectation behind it is not even deliberate. Your customer is not thinking about which software you run. They are simply used to not having to write the same thing down twice.

A new hire arrives with expectations

Week one. The new person asks where to find previous quotes, so they have something to work from. The answer is to ask Kate. Two days later they ask what was last agreed with a particular client. The answer, again, is to ask Kate.

What follows from that is that ramp-up time no longer depends on how hard the work is. It depends on how much of it has to be handed over out loud. If almost everything is verbal, a new hire will not close anything on their own for months, and an experienced colleague loses their own week answering.

The same thing runs in the other direction when someone leaves. Whatever only existed in someone's head walks out with them. Not out of spite. There was simply nowhere to write it down.

The partner referring to an old job

A partner calls to ask what delivery time last year's agreement gives them. At your end that agreement lives in an email thread that a colleague ran at the time. You find it, except the email only carries the quote number, the details are in an attachment, the attachment changed on the third round, and somebody else sent the third round.

The partner is not asking whether you are good at your job. They want the delivery time, and they expect you to be able to look it up as quickly as they looked up their own before picking up the phone.

The relationship does not suffer from this, not the first time and not the tenth. What suffers is that on the next contract they will be the one drafting the terms, because they are the ones with a written record of what happened so far. Whoever keeps the history sets the terms, and that holds even when the other side is entirely fair about it.

When somebody outside asks you for paperwork

Your accountant wants a contract from a job that closed two years ago. The only copy is in an inbox, and it is the inbox of a colleague who no longer works here. A grant application wants a signed document scanned, and it turns out the signed version only exists on paper, in a drawer.

Individually these are trifles. They are the kind of work nobody schedules, that happens every week anyway, and that always arrives with a deadline somebody else set.

From inside the company it never looks like a problem, because it always gets sorted out in the end. From outside, it is precisely the difference between a company that is predictable to work with and one that is not. Whoever asks you for something is not measuring how well you work. They are measuring how long it takes before somebody gets back to them.

When what you have now is enough

Not everybody has a problem here.

If you work alone, you have four customers, and your spreadsheet holds everything you actually want to know, then your operation is digital already. It does not become digital by buying software for it. It is digital because nobody gets stuck at any of the four places above, and because at all four of them you are the only person anyone needs to ask.

The test is simple. Think back over last week and count how many times somebody had to wait while you went looking for something. If the answer is never, there is nothing to solve right now, and the most expensive thing you could do is solve it anyway. If the answer is several times, you do not have a software shortage. The information is simply not where people go looking for it.

Where IntrApp fits into the picture

IntrApp is not another program at the end of the list. It is the foundation a company runs on, a Business Operating System, which means it is not a CRM and not an ERP.

Its answer to all four thresholds is the same one: the customer sits next to the task, the history sits next to the customer, and whoever goes looking finds it without having to ask anyone.

You do not need us for it. You can start on your own, the automated setup takes around thirty minutes, and we do not bill for implementation or training. If something is missing, you can request a feature; if roughly three quarters of our customers would use it too, we build it for free and everyone gets it.

This article was about where the bar sits today. What happens over two years to a company that clears it is a separate article.

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