The High Price of Disconnected Agency Systems: Bad Things Happen if Management is Missing the Big Picture

Adopting and incorporating tech into any business can be a double-edged sword. The positives -- improved team interaction, clear communication, data accessibility, process transparency -- speak for themselves. The frustrations arise when disparate systems designed for highly specific functions get patched together, causing cumulative trouble brought on by their incompatibility.

If you’re in a leadership position at a marketing or advertising agency, you’re probably familiar with the haphazard acquisition of new apps, platforms, and software packages. Like Band-Aids, they can provide a quick fix to a particular process, but their benefit tends to stay in a silo. As your creative and accounting teams adopt these solutions, they get some benefits, but that doesn’t translate agency-wide.

Critical information on project status, talent bandwidth, profit margin and the status of the business-development pipeline exists on separate islands. Yes, you might come up with a way to gather data from every department, but the time and effort required to engineer that ends up erasing any efficiencies realized by those diverse systems. Getting an accurate view of agency health becomes next to impossible.

To stay in step with today’s ultra-competitive agency landscape, integrating diverse systems is essential. Agency management that overlooks this risks subjecting their shop to serious drawbacks such as:

Sluggish Responsiveness

It’s not a revelation to say that business today moves at breakneck speed. Clients want their deliverables yesterday. Internal teams responsible for different aspects of a campaign need quick, clean handoffs between phases to stay on deadline. Through it all, project managers stay committed to managing client expectations and maintaining clear communications. Any breakdown or disconnect here subjects an initiative to frustrating delays that are absolutely avoidable provided all systems are working together.

Those Insidious Data Silos

If systems can’t connect intuitively, you’re losing lots of information. In a very real sense, you don’t know what you don’t know, you can’t make informed, strategic decisions concerning the direction and health of your agency. You’re missing a single point of truth.

Amplified Inefficiency and Problematic Productivity

Efficiency fuels productivity, which, we know, is key to profitability. Integrated systems make it exponentially easier to obtain the data any employee might need to get their job done both effectively and efficiently. For management, that means a true sense of talent availability to tackle current projects, and the agency’s overall new-business bandwidth.

It would be great to wave a magic wand and create complete system integration within your agency, but unless one of your clients is Hogwarts, it’s not going to be that simple. It can, however, be straightforward. Working with the right partner, your management team can move toward an integrated systems solution that gets every professional in your agency working from the same spellbook. That’s when you’ll see the real magic of improved workflow efficiency, rapid client responsiveness, energized productivity, and increased new-business bandwidth.