What owners describe when they describe a problem

The most common thing we found across 274,676 posts from business owners was not a request for a product, a platform or a technology.

It was a description of a person doing something a computer should be doing.

Copying between two systems. Re-keying an order that already exists somewhere else. Reconciling two spreadsheets that were never going to agree. Chasing a tracking number. Forwarding a file so that somebody else can type its contents into a different box.

It is almost never framed as software

Owners describe this as being busy. Or as needing another hire. Or as being personally bad at operations, which is the version that gets said with an apology attached. The word manual turns up far more often in that corpus than any product category does.

Which means the problem is usually visible long before anyone thinks of it as something software could take. By the time it is described as a software problem, a business has often been paying for it in salary for years.

The shape this takes in practiceA business quietly hires two or three people to be an integration between systems that do not talk to each other. Nobody decided that. It accumulated: one person to handle the volume, another when the first was overwhelmed, a process document, then a second process document because the first was out of date. The work is not building something clever. It is noticing what those people are actually doing all day, and replacing it with the integration nobody got round to.

That is the least fashionable category of software there is, and on the evidence of the corpus it is the largest.