Why Organisational Inertia is Your Biggest Competitor

This blog post is the third article in the four-part series, The ROI Imperative. Tractivity Chairman, Paul Rivers, explores why organisational inertia and fragmented data are the real barriers to effective stakeholder management, rather than rival software platforms. 

Catch up on the articles: Article 1 | Article 2 | Article 4.

Our biggest competitor isn't a platform 

Ask most software companies who their competitors are, and they'll give you a list of platforms. We could do the same; there are other stakeholder management systems on the market, and several of the best known are headquartered outside the UK. Tractivity has been built and supported in the UK since 2002, with a UK-based client success team working UK and EU hours. Where a supplier is based, and where its support team sits, are both easy things to ask.

But if I'm honest about what we're really up against, it isn't them. It's the way things already work.

In the vast majority of organisations we speak to, stakeholder management is happening already, just not through a single, integrated system. It's happening through a patchwork of tools that have accumulated over time, chosen for individual tasks, never quite designed to work together. Outlook for emails and contacts. SurveyMonkey for consultation feedback. Eventbrite for events. Mailchimp for mass communications. And underneath all of it: spreadsheets. Many spreadsheets. Maintained by different people, in different formats, with different governance, or no governance at all.

The problem with the patchwork

The patchwork feels manageable when you're in it. People have found their workarounds. They know which spreadsheet to look in. They've built a rough process around the gaps. And the individual costs of each tool are low enough that nobody has added them up and asked whether the total makes sense.

But consider what this actually means for an organisation. When a key member of staff leaves, their stakeholder knowledge, painstakingly built up across folders, inboxes, and spreadsheets that live on their machine, largely goes with them. There is no institutional memory. There is no audit trail. There is no way to demonstrate, to a regulator or a board, the full picture of your stakeholder engagement activity.

There may also be a data security question that nobody has fully confronted yet. Where personal data about stakeholders sits in ungoverned spreadsheets, is shared by email, or is stored on personal drives, it becomes harder to evidence the accountability, security and retention duties UK GDPR places on you. IBM's 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report put the global average cost of a data breach at $4.88 million, and found that more than one third of breaches involved shadow data, which IBM defines as data stored in unmanaged data sources. That is precisely what an ungoverned spreadsheet of stakeholder contacts is.

A message for CEOs

I want to speak directly to the chief executives and directors reading this, because the patchwork problem isn't really an IT problem. It's a governance and risk problem that sits at the board level.

Ask yourself these questions. Do you know, at any given moment, how many spreadsheets containing stakeholder personal data exist in your organisation? Do you know who has access to them? Could you demonstrate to a regulator the full history of your engagement with a particular community or influential stakeholder group? If a key member of your team left tomorrow, would that knowledge walk out the door with them?

If the honest answer to any of those questions gives you pause to reflect, then the status quo is not a neutral position. It is a risk that is accumulating, quietly but dangerously, in the background.

Fragmented data is not a technical problem. It is a governance risk, and it belongs on the CEO's agenda.

The cost of the patchwork, calculated honestly

Here's something else worth considering. The organisations we speak to who use the patchwork approach, and Outlook, SurveyMonkey, Eventbrite, Mailchimp and assorted spreadsheets are only examples, are often surprised when they add the licence fees up alongside the staff time spent moving data between them.

The tool costs vary enormously with team size and volume, so the number worth calculating is the total cost of ownership, not the subscription line. Our own pricing is published from £9,495 per year with all core functionality included, so you can do that sum before you speak to us.

What they usually do not have is one place where a stakeholder's survey response, event attendance, complaint and email history sit against the same record. Each of these tools reports well on its own activity, and they do connect: Mailchimp publishes an integrations directory of more than 300 apps, including forms and surveys and ticketing and event management categories, SurveyMonkey publishes an integrations directory and app directory, and Eventbrite publishes an App Marketplace and a developer platform.

The question is not whether they connect but what the joined-up record looks like afterwards, and who maintains it. Ask to see a single stakeholder's full history, end to end, in whatever you use today. Consolidation isn't just tidier. It typically means fewer systems to govern, fewer places personal data can sit unnoticed, and one set of reports the board can act on.

In my final post, I'll draw these threads together and explain what we actually mean when we say Tractivity is a different kind of partner.