tldr:
- most software products are built to perform their task or set of tasks, not to integrate with other products that are designed the exact same way,
- cost and maintenance of legacy systems with existing customers often preclude innovation,
- fractured architecture stifles business
My first company was also my first professional foray into software. After making a run in edtech, we pivoted to healthcare and were ultimately acquired by a healthcare technology, research, and consulting company.
We had built a tool for targeted, trackable, efficient, mobile communication across complex organizations. But, we quickly realized we needed good content to drive usage – research, data, operational updates and so forth. And, ideally, that content should be targeted (which we could do), timely, and hyper relevant to the recipient. Think Operating Room schedule updates for surgeons or physician performance metrics or the latest research on Covid treatment.
Our acquiring company had all of this content across a number of products and their customers were clamoring for it. The tool we had built – and they had acquired – would help liberate and distribute their content and provide new value to their large existing customer base. It was a perfect match.
EXCEPT:
Their research lived in one set of products with its own department, team, stack, and business relationship with clients. They had their way of doing things.
Operating Room scheduling lived in a suite of tools focused on hospital operations that were completely distinct from research and performance tools, and even distinct among themselves. There was no good way to share that data.
Physician performance data lived across numerous, very specific, individual products. So, Dr. Williams in Product 1 had no technical relationship to Dr. Williams in Product 2 or Product 3 and so forth – despite being the same person. As a result, a holistic view of Dr. Williams’ performance had to be exported, normalized, and reports manually developed by an army of Business Analysts. Automating was years away.
Long story short: despite the premise and promise of our acquisition, we never got around to actually ingesting or delivering this content to the market. We never realized the business value because the fractured nature of the company’s existing software precluded it.
This is why I jumped at the opportunity to join BOS back in 2018. We’ve built the automation and have the implementation support to help companies modernize their architecture, simplify product integrations, secure their product suite, and increase overall efficiency in their business software.
I guess the upside of our failure is that if our acquiring company had had BOS (not available at the time) and we’d been able to integrate and share data like we expected, I may have never joined BOS!
