Who knows your business better than you? Not your vendors. Not your suppliers. Not your partners. Of course, you know your business better. Your long-term employees know your business from their perspective. Not many companies need to be reminded of this. They know they are experts.

Here’s the challenge of being an expert at your business. Your scope of expertise is very biased towards your business and how your business has been running. This is the impact that crashes most Print MIS/ERP implementations. The print business experts don’t listen to the software experts. The software experts don’t listen to the print business experts. A whole lot of “not listening” results in stalled implementations, failed implementations, or just sub-optimal implementations.

Expertise is best shared. Expertise is best when it's mutually respected. Just think about when software experts respect the experts of the print business they are implementing into. Then imagine the print business experts respect the software experts. When mutual respect happens, there is a knowledge exchange. That knowledge exchange is the secret sauce of successful software implementations. Every print business has some degree of belief in their exceptionalism or uniqueness. Every software vendor has some degree of belief their product could work in any business. The magic is in the middle, not in the extremes. Imagine that in our politics? The middle is where we all are, yet the extremes is where all the fuss is made.