Sometimes in the business of technology having the skill to listen outweighs having the skill to solve the technology challenge at hand for the customer. Recently, we were faced with helping a sizeable behavioral healthcare organization scale its faxing infrastructure. The goal was simple. Implement an end-to-end digital fax solution that could also reliably deliver faxes to locally installed multi-functional printers. Simple right? 

Well, we began by interviewing end users from management to front-line employees, asking the same question, “How do you send and receive faxes?”. The responses were diverse and broad. Faxes numbers were amassed, vendor complaints poured in, and the frustration with using their current solution mounted. 

At this point, we documented the current state and began listening. There’s a theme here, to their current vendor. We discovered that the current vendor’s faxing architecture was not designed to scale with how the customer intended (and used) faxing to support their business. Moreover, we reached out and listened to their Internet Service Provider (ISP) who informed us that their security architecture did not guarantee that the vendor’s faxing architecture would reliably deliver all faxes running on their network. I know what you’re thinking, all technology should all just work together. If only it were that simple

So, what was the fix? Simply find a solution that could handle the scale of the business and will work flawlessly with the ISP’s network. So we called around, interviewed a slew of new vendors, tested, and made a plan for migration. Who knew? Sometimes it pays to listen to the needs of the business and not let the attractiveness of the innovation drive the decision. Like the Siren in Greek methodology, technology too can be alluring and lead the best-intended companies astray.