The technology of a large company
without being one

1. The world is not slowing down

There is something you forget quickly when you run a mid-sized company : the market grants you no discount on its demands.

The client who expects an answer within the hour expects it from us exactly as from an international group. The tax authority that requires a document in digital form does not enquire about our headcount before setting the deadline. The supplier who now works through a platform will not go back to paper to please us.

We live in a world so dynamic that waiting has stopped being a neutral position. Waiting has become a decision : the decision to let others set the pace we will have to run at.

2. The myth of free

I am often told to start with what costs nothing and invest later, once the company has grown. I believe the opposite is true.

Relying on free systems costs more than paying. Not on the invoice — on everything else.

• Free carries no service commitment. When it goes down, it goes down, and nobody owes you anything : no explanation, no deadline, no remedy.
• Free has nobody to call. The day a record goes missing, there is no number to ring, and your emergency is nobody else's emergency.
• Free has no contract. What you place there is not always as much yours as you believe, and the terms change without asking you.
• Free has no continuity. The tool your teams learned this year can shut down next year, without notice and sometimes without an export.

The price of a free tool is never legible at the moment you adopt it. It becomes legible the day it fails you — and on that day it almost always exceeds what you would have paid to avoid it.

3. What those with the means actually do

Let us look, without any complex about it, at what large industries do. They fund their research and development to the tune of several billions. You might assume that at that level of spending there is some waste. The opposite is true : nobody watches their spending the way they do.

If they commit such sums, it is not to keep up with the market. It is to get ahead of it. They think expansion, they want to be first movers, they intend to decide the future rather than absorb it. Their technology budget is not an operating cost : it is how they buy a head start.

That is where we should be looking. Not to imitate them — we do not have the means, and it would be a strategic error — but to understand what that money actually buys.

4. The only question that matters

Out of that observation came the question that guides my work. I first put it like this : how do you have a large company without being one ?

That was badly put. Size is not an end in itself, and plenty of companies grow while losing what made them strong. The right formulation is this one :

Put that way, the question stops being a wish. It has an answer, and that answer is within our reach.

5. The answer is one word

Dematerialisation. Outsourcing. Cloud. Three terms describing the same thing from three angles, and one word that sums them up : digitalisation.

Digitalising is not computerising. It is taking your trade — the one you actually practise, with its rules and its craft — and handing it to a system that executes it. It means :

• making the work automatic where it was merely repetitive ;
• making it visible, so that anyone knows where a file stands without having to ask ;
• making it reachable without travelling, from anywhere and at any hour ;
• and getting all of it without bearing the real cost that would imply if you had to build the infrastructure yourself, hire the team that maintains it, and write it off against your revenue alone.

That is the reversal, and it is a considerable one. Large companies paid for the servers, the research, the teams and the years of mistakes. The cloud and outsourcing let us rent the result for the price of a subscription. We are not buying their size : we are buying their head start, retail.

6. Becoming professional, concretely

How do you go about it ? It is simple, and it comes down to one word : becoming professional. Not in the sense of craft — I assume that is already there, it is what keeps the company alive. In the sense of what the outside world can observe.

Professional addresses.

Email at your own domain name, not a free address. It is the first gap a client, a banker or a lender notices — and it is the cheapest one to close.

A professional website.

Not a decorative shop window, but the place where your trade is set out, where you are found, where you are reached, and where anyone can verify that you really exist. Today a company that cannot be found online has to justify existing.

Professional tools.

Accounts kept in a system rather than a spreadsheet, documents filed in a document management system rather than an inbox, processes that leave a trace. The rule is simple : whatever repeats should be tooled.

Taken one at a time, each of these looks minor. Together they change what you are in the eyes of the market — and, very quickly, what you actually are.

7. At the standard, with fewer resources

This is the phrase I use to describe what we are building : a company at the standard, with fewer resources.

It is not a compromise, and I want to say so plainly. A mid-sized company that digitalises does not become a small large company. It becomes something else. It keeps what size takes away — speed of decision, closeness to the client, the absence of useless layers — and adds what only size used to make possible : traceability, availability, proof.

That, I believe, is the new role of information systems. For a long time they were the privilege of those who could afford them, and they widened the gap between the large and the rest. Properly thought through, they narrow it.

What remains is to decide. The world will not wait for us.