Business System Consultation Center - Our Business System ColumnVol.176 2026.06.01 高橋実

Systems Bought Without Understanding the Workplace Get Crushed by the Workplace

Thank you for your interest and continued support.
This is Takahashi from the Marketing Plan Research Laboratory.

When presidents, executives, or IT departments decide to implement systems for the sake of "creating work for themselves," the result is often a system that nobody uses. This is a classic "all too common" pattern in system implementation failures.

The root of all problems lies in the fact that the people who select the system and the people who use it are different. From the selection team's perspective, the success or failure of system implementation tends to be evaluated simply on "whether it was implemented or not." Whether the system runs smoothly after implementation often becomes a secondary consideration.

In these types of projects, vendor and software selection, cost estimates, contracts, and implementation schedules are typically all decided "at the top" before anything comes down to the workplace level.

While workplace staff know the real "ins and outs" of operations better than anyone, costs have already been finalized and there's no room left for their input to be reflected. However, workplace staff can't openly oppose the system implementation itself, so they end up accepting the system on the surface.

After system implementation, the core business continues to run on Excel and paper as it always has. Since the workplace has years of refined operational know-how (such as detailed customer service practices), the new system gets treated as "work separate from actual operations."

If the system could be evaluated solely on benefits like "great that we can now create meeting materials with new perspectives in real-time," that would be one thing. But the system was likely initially proposed with numerous other benefits such as workplace efficiency, error prevention, and elimination of person-dependent processes.

To prevent this situation, workplace staff must be involved from the initial software selection stage. If possible, they should be given decision-making authority close to that of a project leader, not just an advisory role.

Simply getting workplace input before costs are determined should significantly change the outcome. I can state definitively that the most important stakeholders in software selection are not the president, executives, or IT department, but the workplace staff themselves.

Get this wrong, and you'll quietly accumulate nothing but impressive-looking "work projects" and unused legacy systems within your company.

I hope the above serves as a useful reference for your system and vendor selection processes.

That's all, Thank you for reading.

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