Source
Over the years, I’ve worked with companies in very different industries.
The products were different.
The processes were different.
The people were different.
And yet, the first problem was almost always the same.
Information had no single place to live.
It arrived through emails, Word documents, spreadsheets, phone calls, messages, or handwritten notes.
The same piece of information would be copied several times, updated in different places, and eventually no one could say with confidence which version was the correct one.
For a long time, I assumed the problem was a lack of automation.
Eventually, I realized that automation can’t fix a system whose information is already disorganized.
Before building any workflow, the first step was always something much simpler:
help people collect information in one shared place.
In many projects, that place turned out to be nothing more than a Google Sheet.
Not because it was the most sophisticated tool.
Because it was the one everyone already knew how to use.
From that moment on, everything else became a consequence.
The same information started feeding websites, catalogues, technical data sheets, product labels, QR codes, multilingual documentation, and printed materials.
Every change was made only once.
Every destination read from the same source.
I eventually realized that the real transformation wasn’t the automation itself.
It was giving information a place to live.
Since then, every new project has started with the same question.
Not:
“Which software should we use?”
But:
“Where should this information live?”
The answer changes every time.
The question never does.
You can’t automate chaos. First, you have to give it a structure.