Too Many Places: Where the Loose Ends Hide in a Small Business
The follow-up is rarely lost because nobody cared. It is usually lost because it arrived somewhere you were not looking.
A customer fills in a website form while you are on site.
A supplier replies to an email while you are driving.
A quote sits in the accounting system waiting for a decision. Someone rings and says they will get back to you. Another person sends a message that needs an answer tomorrow.
None of those things are unusual. The problem is that they all live in different places.
That is the next big problem Dazza Follow-Up is being built to tackle.
The loose ends are spread across the business
Most small businesses do not have one single place where every follow-up starts.
Email catches some of it. Website forms catch some. Quotes and invoices create their own follow-up jobs. Phone calls and conversations create plenty more.
Then there are the little promises that never make it into any system at all: “I’ll ring him Thursday”, “chase that certificate tomorrow”, or “check whether they approved the revised price”.
The owner becomes the thing joining all those systems together.
That works right up until the owner gets busy.
DFU is not meant to swallow every system
The answer is not to copy every email, customer record, invoice and form into one enormous database.
That would just create another system to maintain.
The DFU direction is narrower. A connected system should contribute the bit that matters for follow-up: there is a loose end, who it relates to, who has the next action and when it needs attention.
The original system should remain responsible for the original job. Accounting stays accounting. Email stays email. A website enquiry stays a website enquiry.
DFU is being built to remember the follow-up obligation that sits across them.
Some connections exist. More are being developed
We already have substantial connector work in the DFU project, and several additional connection streams are now being developed.
That does not mean we are going to publish a giant wall of logos and claim every connection is finished.
A connector is not useful just because it can technically log in or read a record. It has to prove that it can identify the right loose end, for the right person, at the right time, without creating a mess.
That testing is still ahead of us in important areas, so DFU remains under development and there is no release date being announced yet.
The goal is fewer places to remember
The promise behind DFU is still very simple.
You should not have to remember which inbox, quote screen, form submission or notebook contains the thing you need to chase.
Your follow-up secretary should bring the loose end back to your attention when it matters.
That is what “connecting the loose ends” means to us.
Tomorrow I’ll look at a phrase software companies use very easily — connected — and what it actually needs to mean before we are prepared to call a DFU connection useful.
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