Anniversaries tend to invite reflection. They’re often framed as milestones, markers of progress, or proof that something worked long enough to matter.
As Dispatch Integration reaches ten years, the reflection that keeps surfacing for us isn’t about growth or longevity. It’s about perspective. Specifically, how much the technology landscape has changed and how little the real work underneath it has.
The tools look different. The language has evolved. The pace has accelerated. But the core problem we started Dispatch to solve is the same one we still see every day. Organizations don’t reach their full potential not because they lack technology, but because they struggle to apply technology in ways that amplify how they connect with their customers, their market, and their people at scale. Ten years in, that truth feels clearer than ever.
Digital Transformation Promises Speed But Reality Demands Structure
When Gavin and I started Dispatch, digital transformation was already a loaded phrase. New platforms promised simplification. Cloud software promised flexibility. Automation promised efficiency. Each wave came with real advances, but in each iteration, complexity has seemed to shift rather than disappear.
Early on, much of our work revolved around file-based integrations. Files were the primary mechanism for moving data between systems, especially in HR and finance. These projects were slow, expensive, and unforgiving. A single error could ripple through payroll, benefits, or financial systems, which made every project high stakes.
What stood out wasn’t that this work was optional. It was that it was unavoidable and that the effort and project complexity often felt disproportionate to the cost of the applications the files were moving in and out of. Organizations would invest heavily in modern applications, only to discover that the work to integrate them into their app ecosystem rivaled the cost of the implementation. That mismatch shaped how we thought about integration from the very beginning.
Every Advancement Faces The Same Hurdle
As APIs emerged and became more widely adopted, the mechanics of our work changed as well. Data could move transactionally and work could flow closer to real time. Systems could talk to each other instead of throwing files over the fence. That shift opened the door to workflow automation and eventually to more interactive experiences where business users could participate directly in how work moved across platforms.
Today, we’ve entered another shift. Agents, automation layers, and AI driven capabilities are accelerating what’s possible even further. Teams can now move from idea to execution in days instead of months. The speed of change is no longer linear. It’s compounding.
But through every one of these eras, one thing has stayed stubbornly consistent. None of this works if businesses can’t articulate the processes that generate value, or if their underlying data is fragmented, unreliable, or poorly understood. Faster systems do not fix bad inputs. More intelligent tooling does not compensate for unclear ownership. Speed only helps if the foundational data and business process can support it.
This is where perspective matters.
Perspective Turns Technology Into Outcomes
One of the earliest realizations that shaped Dispatch was that customers do not experience their business through individual applications. They experience it through outcomes. People getting paid. Benefits working as expected. Data being available when decisions need to be made, and without manual intervention or heroics behind the scenes.
Historically enterprise organizations have split responsibility in ways that make these outcomes harder to achieve. Applications live with one team. Integrations get handed to another. Business processes defined and operated by another team. And data quality and integrity sometimes just falls through the cracks. When something breaks, accountability fragments just as quickly.
Our point of view has always been different. If the business depends on the outcome, then the business needs to be part of how the system is designed, integrated, and operated. Integration cannot be a technical afterthought, and data is not an IT cleanup task. Both have to be core components of how the business systems are engineered.
That belief shaped how we worked early on and why we gained traction with organizations willing to think beyond technical boundaries. We were never interested in solving problems only where a technical need emerged. We wanted to help wherever the work actually broke down, which required us to intimately understand the business case, the process and the latest technology that can be leveraged to deliver an improved and reliable future state.
Stability Is The Outcome That Matters Most
Over time, this approach has led us to value stability as the thing that deeply matters in practice, but that rarely shows up in digital transformation decks.
Stability doesn’t mean standing still. It means systems that behave predictably even as the business changes. It means processes that don’t collapse under growth. It means organizations that can move faster without introducing fragility into their operations.
Looking back, stability is what many of our customers were really buying, even if they didn’t use that word. They wanted payroll to run without drama. They wanted data they could trust. They wanted fewer late nights fixing what should have worked in the first place. And they wanted a stable platform that would enable them to drive growth confidently.
Internally, stability mattered just as much. As a small company operating in fast-moving markets, providing consistency for our team and our clients required discipline. We had to stay opinionated without becoming rigid, and we needed to always be grounded in outcomes, while the technology stack keeps evolving around us.
Judgment Matters More Than Newness
We know that the next decade will bring even more change. Data ownership will continue to move closer to business teams as low-code, no-code, and agentic tools lower barriers. AI will make execution faster and expectations higher. The temptation to treat new technology as the breakthrough will only grow stronger.
Our view remains the same. Technology can leverage, but perspective determines whether that leverage produces value or volatility.
Ten years in, we’re still solving the same problem we set out to address. Helping organizations design systems where data moves with intent, work is efficient and high value, and change doesn’t introduce chaos.
The tools will keep changing. The work beneath them won’t.
Let Dispatch figure out the underlying work that needs to be done for your business systems to thrive. Request a business systems assessment.
Cameron Hay is the CEO of Dispatch Integration, a data integration and workflow automation company with clients in Canada, US, Europe and Australia. He has over 30 years of leadership experience in various technology-oriented industries.
