I’ve been saying for years that “software-based solutions are being judged by the user experience of Apple, the speed of a Google search, and the inventory availability of Amazon.” Ouch. That is a seriously high set of expectations. Since almost every person you speak with in your business interacts with one or all these solutions on a weekly basis, this isn’t a set of expectations that are going to fade—they keep getting reinforced.

In one way, they show us what’s possible. You can have beautiful user experiences. You can have literally unlimited inventory and selection. You can have incredible speed of page loads in your application. The challenge is that all those things ARE POSSIBLE, and they all require a gigantic assortment of talent working endlessly for three of the most profitable companies ever created. The dream is now layered with some reality.

Dreaming is way more fun. When you are a multi-site print company running your entire business on spreadsheets, it’s easy to dream of a complex hub and spoke model with job sharing, resource sharing, and enterprise-wide dashboards. Dreaming is fun. The reality is that you have a long haul to get just one of your plants to adopt a true system of record. I am not against dreams; I just think we should consider them as draft long-term goals—and the reason I use the term “draft” is that we aren’t very smart at the beginning of our journey. In this example, the printer hasn’t ever used a Print MIS/ERP in any of their plants. They don’t know what they don’t know about this experience. As they move down the journey, they will learn more and more. We get smarter the farther we travel. And at some point, that “dream” we had in the beginning might start to look downright foolish.