The Most Expensive Software Problem Might Be the One
Everyone Has Learned to Live With
MOST BUSINESSES KNOW WHEN A SYSTEM IS COMPLETELY BROKEN. 
PEOPLE COMPLAIN. 
WORK STOPS. CUSTOMERS ARE AFFECTED. 
EVENTUALLY, SOMEONE HAS TO FIX IT.
The harder problems to see are the ones that aren’t quite broken. The system works. It just doesn’t work particularly well.
So people adapt.
What Adaptation Looks Like in Practice:
- Someone creates a spreadsheet to track information the system doesn’t capture.
- Another employee manually moves data from one application to another.
- A team develops its own process because the official workflow takes too long.
- Someone keeps a separate document because that’s the only reliable way to know what’s actually happening.
- Eventually, one employee becomes the person everyone asks because they’re the only one who understands how all the pieces fit together.
But the economics of software development are beginning to change.
The Workaround Eventually Becomes the Workflow
Workarounds usually begin for perfectly sensible reasons. A system doesn’t quite support what someone needs to do, so they find another way.
A spreadsheet fills the gap. An email gets sent. Someone copies and pastes information. A manual approval gets added. Another system gets introduced.
Individually, each decision may make sense. The problem is what happens over time.
Temporary fixes become permanent processes. New employees are taught the workaround. More steps get added around it. Eventually, nobody questions why the process works that way.
The workaround has become the workflow. And at that point, the original problem can become surprisingly difficult to see.
Look at the Work Happening Around the Software
When businesses evaluate technology, they naturally tend to look at the systems themselves. Does the CRM work? Does the ERP work? Does the order management system work? Does the accounting platform work?
The answer might genuinely be yes. But that doesn’t tell you whether the business process works well.
A better question may be: What are people doing around the system to make it work?
Are they maintaining separate spreadsheets, entering the same information twice, moving information manually between applications or using email because the official approval process is too cumbersome?
Are they exporting data just to turn it into something useful? Does a critical process depend on one employee knowing what happens next?
Those activities tell you something the software itself may not. They show you where the business has adapted to limitations in its technology or processes.
Inefficiency Doesn't Always Feel Inefficient
This is what makes these problems easy to miss.
If somebody spends ten minutes every day transferring information between two systems, it may not feel particularly significant. Neither does maintaining a spreadsheet, sending an extra email or checking information manually.
But multiply those small inefficiencies across employees, transactions, departments and years, and they can become substantial.
There is also a less visible cost. Manual handoffs create opportunities for errors. Duplicate information becomes inconsistent. Processes become dependent on individual employees. Reporting becomes harder. Customers wait longer. And employees spend time maintaining the process rather than doing work that creates more value.
Yet because the business still functions, the underlying problem rarely becomes urgent enough to address.
Broken systems get attention. Tolerated inefficiencies often don’t.
Replacing the System Isn't Necessarily the Answer
Once these problems are identified, the obvious reaction can be: “We need a new system.”
Sometimes that’s exactly right. But not always.
The core system may actually be doing its job perfectly well. The problem may exist in the gaps between systems, people and processes.
Perhaps two applications need to exchange information automatically. Perhaps a repetitive workflow could be automated. Employees might need a simple interface that brings information from several systems into one place. A small custom application might handle a process the primary platform was never designed to manage.
Or AI might add a capability the existing system was never designed to provide — helping employees find information, interpret data, handle repetitive tasks or make better use of the knowledge already sitting inside the business.
Or perhaps the technology is fine and the process itself needs redesigning.
A relatively small intervention can sometimes remove a surprisingly large amount of friction.
So before asking “What system should we replace?”, it may be worth asking:
“Why does all this work need to happen around the system in the first place?”
Your unofficial systems may tell you where to look
There is a simple exercise almost any organization can do: look for the unofficial technology running alongside your official technology.
- The spreadsheets everyone relies on
- The documents that explain how something really gets done
- The email chains functioning as approval systems
- The information copied between applications
- The reports someone manually assembles every week
- The single employee everyone depends on because they understand an undocumented process
Don’t immediately assume those things are bad. Instead, ask why they exist.
They may be compensating for something the business genuinely needs but its existing systems and processes don’t provide. In that sense, the workaround isn’t merely a problem—it’s evidence.
It can show you where an opportunity for integration, automation, AI, process improvement or targeted software development may exist.
Sometimes Transformation Is Smaller Than You Think
At Tiburon, we spend a lot of time looking at the intersection of people, systems, processes and AI. One thing we’ve learned is that meaningful improvement doesn’t always require a massive technology transformation.
Sometimes it does. But sometimes the better solution is connecting two things that don’t currently talk to each other, automating a repetitive step, building a small piece of software around an existing platform, adding AI to help people work with existing information more effectively, or simply making information easier for employees to access.
Sometimes it’s simply redesigning a process that has accumulated unnecessary complexity over the years.
The technology matters. But understanding why people created the workaround in the first place often matters more.
What has your business simply learned to live with?
Maybe the interesting question isn’t whether your software works. It probably does.
The question is what your employees have to do every day to make it work.
Those spreadsheets, manual processes, duplicate entries and unofficial workflows may look like ordinary parts of running the business. Some probably are.
But others may be pointing directly at opportunities you’ve stopped noticing because everyone has become so good at working around them.
Sometimes the most expensive problem isn’t the one that’s broken. It’s the one everyone has learned to live with.
If this sounds familiar in your business, we’d be happy to compare notes and discuss what might be worth looking at.
