24 Jars Of Jam

The Internet has fundamentally changed the practice of public accounting by exponentially expanding our productivity and by providing an enormous array of professional tools. As I see it, expanding options for practitioners is really a double-edged sword: We (mostly) have a preference for variety and even for novelty, and, the more choices we have, the better the chance that we will each find the product we really want. But too much choice can actually paralyze people, leaving them, paradoxically, worse off.

Too Many Choices
A well-known experiment conducted by Professors Mark Lepper and Sheena Iyengar (economists at Stanford and Columbia, respectively) illustrates the point: They set up two tables in a supermarket, one with 24 jars of jam and the other with six. And discount coupons were offered to anyone who stopped to sample the jams. Of the people who stopped at the 24-jars-of-jam table, only 3 percent went on to buy jam, while 30 percent of the people who stopped at the six-jars-of-jam table went on to buy jam. Too many choices, it seems, often frustrates us if we have no reasonable way to navigate through the choices.

I’ve observed the effects of this phenomenon as our profession moves, sometimes painfully, from the analog (paper) age to a new digital (“paperless”) one. When presenting at one of the larger summer tradeshows, I walked the show floor and counted 14 vendors that offered “document management systems” (DMS). A quick review of this magazine and a few others serving the profession revealed that there are over 30 DMS products currently being marketed to the public accounting profession. Perhaps it’s that expansive array of choices that’s paralyzed nearly two-thirds of the public accounting firms in America to the point of inaction, leaving them without the one tool absolutely required as the centerpiece of their journey toward the digital future.

A Way To Solve The Problem
It’s not that these firms don’t WANT to move forward. They most certainly do. They see their friends and competitors reaping the benefits of the move to digital documents. The problem is that the urgent continually gets in the way of the important along with the fact that the DMS decision (that’s the “important” one here) is so complicated. In my opinion, that complication is caused, in great part, by the sheer number of alternatives to consider. I vetted this opinion with several of the “Dream Team” (our regular columnists), our DMS reviewers, and some of the country’s most well-respected technology and practice management consultants. After a dozen or so conversations and after hearing the same agreement over and over, I concluded that this was a root problem and furthermore concluded that these experts, collectively, along with the vendors in the space, had the domain knowledge to simplify, if not solve, the problem.