You Trained the Tradesperson. You Never Trained the System User.
A tradesperson cannot pick up a tool on day one and start using it at will. They are trained on it. Assessed on it. Reassessed on a cycle, to confirm the skill hasn’t decayed. Certified against a standard that exists independently of who happens to be holding the tool. If certification lapses, the tool is put down until it doesn’t. None of this is bureaucracy — it’s how trades keep people safe and work compliant. High standard, tightly enforced.
Now look at how the same organisation treats the person who logs into the ERP every morning and moves transactions worth more than anything a tradesperson will ever touch with a drill. Minimal training, if any. No set expectation that the business tool is used as designed. No one checks whether they’ve kept current with a system that gets patched, upgraded, and reconfigured every year. Left alone long enough, they invent their own way of doing things — a shadow spreadsheet here, a private workaround there, a personal method for closing the month that only they understand and no one has approved.
Two decades inside ERP programs, and the pattern repeats everywhere: a high standard for the trades, no standard at all for the desk.
That’s the gap. Not the software. Not the vendor. The gap is that business systems have never been given the same status as the tools sitting in a trade’s van.
Executives keep asking why the ERP still feels too complex three years after go-live, why the capital that was signed off on hasn’t delivered what the business case promised. It’s rarely the platform. It’s that no one owns it. The system was implemented, the project team disbanded, and the tool was left to whoever happened to be sitting at the desk when the project closed — no named system owner, no KPI measuring whether it’s used the way it was designed, no governance forum reviewing utilisation the way a safety committee reviews compliance on the tools.
Business systems are not soft infrastructure sitting somewhere behind IT. They are digital assets — the same category as a fleet vehicle or a piece of plant, except they sit on a different line of the balance sheet and get none of the same discipline. A forklift that falls out of certification is pulled from service that day. An ERP module quietly abandoned in favour of an offline spreadsheet keeps running for years, bleeding accuracy and value, because no one is required to notice.
A must-have posture looks like this:
A named system owner for every core business system — the business function that depends on it, not IT by default. Someone whose job includes answering for whether the system is being used as intended.
A training structure that treats system competency the way trades treat tool competency: onboarded on it, assessed on it, reassessed when the system changes — not shown once at go-live and never again.
Clear, written expectations that staff use the business system as the system of record, not as an occasional check-in point between spreadsheets they trust more than the system they were given.
KPIs that measure utilisation and governance, not just uptime. Not “is the system live” but “is the system being used the way it was paid for.”
Until that structure exists inside an organisation, the capital expense will keep leaking the way it always has — quietly, unnoticed, until an executive finally asks why a multi-million-dollar system is being run through Excel.
The standard already exists. It has just been applied to the trades and withheld from everyone else.
