I’ll Take Two Pounds Of Workflow, Please …. To Go!

From the Sept. 2007 Issue

In my 35+ years of practicing public accounting, as a software executive building products for public accountants and as a journalist covering both the profession and the vendors serving it, I’ve seen a lot of buzzwords come and go. Seldom have I ever seen one cause as much excitement (and, unfortunately, so much confusion) as the word workflow. It’s touted at the top of every advertisement, salespeople talk of it incessantly, and all the CPE classes seem to be heavily peppered with it. Now as a technology guy, I’m all in favor of harnessing whatever chip-based horsepower is available. However, in addition to being a practicing accountant, I’m also a pragmatist … and that part of me simply isn’t impressed. At least not yet. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I want to be impressed; I REALLY want to be. And I see so much potential. But we’re just not quite there. Not yet, anyway.

Both the profession and the vendors serving it have a ways to go. The profession, not any one firm specifically, but rather “the profession” as a whole, needs to improve its adaptation to change. We’re held back, as a group, by those among us who insist that they’re “too busy to change” or, worse yet, “too old to change.” The vendor community hears that cry and slows down its development cycle. Vendors are (rightfully) concerned about getting too far in front of the market. Simply put, we’re a victim of the “lowest common denominator” thought process … on both fronts.

The Market Segments

A very bright marketer once told me that every market could be segmented on both the product/service side and the customer side. I’ve applied that advice to the “workflow” market, refined it to a matrix and tested that matrix with several seasoned technology vendors. So far, it’s passed muster. The model separates practicing accountants by their attitudes toward change and toward control. The resultant nine box grid (see illustration) quickly reveals that, by self selection, those practitioners particularly resistant to change, as well as those chronically disorganized, are essentially poor candidates for workflow adoption or adaptation. I’m quite sure that each of you can identify a current or former partner in one of those boxes. (It’s SO much easier to see others rather than ourselves, right?) It’d be more valuable if you could identify YOURSELF in a box, but that’s another column. So that’s the problem on the profession’s side of the equation, but what about the vendor side?

The Problem

Here, the problem is focus. We have “workflow” being marketed as a stand-alone product (i.e., XCM) in a traditional “best of breed” approach; as a component of niche products (i.e., SurePrep Express for tax); inside many of the modules in the major suites (i.e., CCH’s ProSystem fx Document, Engagement, Tax and Practice; Thomson Tax & Accounting’s UltraTax CS, Practice CS, Engagement CS, Payroll CS and Write Up CS); and as a component of nearly every document management system (i.e., GoFileRoom, Doc.It, Acct1st, Interwoven, CabinetNG, etc.). That’s at least FOUR different approaches for a firm to consider. This has resulted in “paralysis by analysis” in many firms. Practitioners are simply confused by the market that offers too many products with each product solving some of the problem and none solving the entire problem.

The Approaches