Organisations have spent decades replacing spreadsheets with enterprise software, so why are so many people still using spreadsheets? Billions of rand are spent every year on enterprise resource systems, customer relationship management platforms, HR software and compliance tools. Implementations take months, sometimes years. Yet, in organisations across SA, the spreadsheet endures.People build workarounds. They maintain parallel records and find ways around the systems that were supposed to make their working lives simpler. That’s not a technology failure. It’s a signal that something more fundamental is going wrong in how software is chosen, deployed and governed. This is the first edition of Software Insights, and we wanted to launch it by taking that question seriously. Not by reviewing products or ranking vendors, but by looking honestly at how software actually functions in South African organisations, across retail, manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, agriculture, government and private enterprise. What we found, consistently, is that the hardest problems aren’t technical. They’re human. Integration fails because nobody owns the decision. Adoption stalls because employees weren’t part of the process. Data sits in silos because the incentives to share it don’t exist. Software shapes how work gets done, how decisions get made, and increasingly, how organisations survive. It deserves more rigorous scrutiny than it usually gets. That’s what we’re here to provide. Brendon Peterson, Editor Browse through the full magazine below (zoom in or go full screen for ease of reading):