I Have So Much to Tell You About Why It Was Never the Software

I've watched companies spend a small fortune on beautiful new finance systems — and six months later, half the team is still living in spreadsheets and email threads. Why does that keep happening?This week I sat down with Paul Dear, VP of Travel EMEA at SAP Concur, to answer the question that's followed me from my years inside implementations to my work leading them now: when a rollout fails, is it ever really the software?Spoiler — it almost never is. We get into the three things that actually decide whether an implementation sticks (people, process, and change management), why finance teams feel the shift harder than anyone, and the North Star every leader should define before touching a single system. Paul also shared a stat that stopped me cold: of the 700 CFOs SAP surveyed, 600 believe their own employees are using AI to generate receipts — not always to defraud, sometimes just because they lost one and the tech made it easy.If you've ever been handed a login and a manual and called that "training," this one's for you.