Using IT (The role of Information Technology in Modern Business)
During the last four years or so there have been some major advances in technology to enable better team working (collaboration) and access to information. This has been brought around in part by the internet revolution and part by the increasing prevalence of broadband connections. The technology is also mature enough to be affordable by all organisations and is no longer the preserve of corporates.
Solutions vs. Services
IT services are what can be termed “nuts and bolts IT”, making sure people’s workstations work, that emails are virus and spam free, printers can be shared. This is utility provision of IT, this will over time become more like the provision of Energy and Telecoms.
IT solutions are what can be termed “Value added IT”, delivering USPs or process automation to leverage more value out of current business processes to improve your bottom line.
IT services... will over time become
more like the provision of Energy and Telecoms
For several industries IT is a fundamental part of their product meaning that they have fully explored the solutions side of their IT systems, some examples of these industries would be Insurance and banking, if their IT systems went down they would cease business activity almost immediately.
At the other extreme there are companies that use IT as a replacement for old methods of working, such as email replacing the need to fax documents, if their IT system went down they would continue to function. The important thing to note with both of these examples is that there is a balance that all organisations need to address between IT services and solutions, most organisations only consider the services side and are therefore missing out on competitive advantage and a better way to enable strategic change.
Knowledge – Life blood of an organisation
With most companies the most valuable asset they have apart from the staff is the information that allows the business to operate, from the process of making your product to how your staff deal with your customers. This information is what allows your business to function. We have moved as a society from one that was solely interested in land ownership, to capital ownership thanks to the industrial revolution up until now where knowledge ownership is the biggest asset a company has.
As with physical and financial assets it is important to manage this knowledge, you audit the other two, why not your knowledge?
Now we have identified knowledge as the life blood of a modern organisation we can look at ways to audit, capture and manage this asset. This is why solutions IT is so important.
Tools
There are several key tools to enable this to be done in a painless and efficient way, allowing your organisation to leverage the most potential from knowledge you already have. The best way to deliver these tools is through a web based system as this provides access to the right people, anytime and anywhere. A few important examples of these tools are detailed below:
Document Management
Advanced online document facilities are available allowing collaboration on documents. This system also features facilities such as version control, check in/out, the ability to roll back to previous versions. This system can easily integrate into your email system allowing documents to be sent to multiple people but keeping one version stored centrally so all changes are available to all users working on the document. This solves the problem of sending out copies to four different people and getting four different copies back, removing the need for you to manually integrate the changes on the final document.
Information Hub
A system that acts as your company website to the public, external client portal and internal management system. This means that you can provide transparency to clients and suppliers and establish a rapid communication channel.
Key Performance Indicators
From the internal management system it is now simple to enable a system which can report your key business performance data in real time. This allows you to fully understand what you organisation is doing and where improvements are being achieved or still need to be made. This is particularly valuable in strategic change programs as it allows everyone to identify how well the strategic plan implementation phase is progressing and highlight areas which need improvement.
As shown there are some important tools that have been enabled due to recent advances in IT. The next thing to cover is the human aspect of these tools. Most people would agree that technology for its own sake is a waste of money. This means that every system that is implemented to help the business, needs full buy in from all key staff in the organisation. There also needs to be a compelling reason for implementing a system, this means for most companies that it requires a bottom line benefit (Return on Investment).
The other perspective we have to consider is that it must make all users lives easier. If the system takes them longer to do their normal job then there is no motivation to change, leading to statements like “give me a pen and paper any day”.
To ensure that the systems actually have a positive effect for all staff it is important to design systems around staff and business processes and not around the features in a particular system. It’s key to design the system from a task accomplishment perspective. This means that the time required to learn the system is reduced because people just need to learn how to achieve their personal or team objectives without having to understand the whole system.
Task orientation in designing a system also ensures that features that are not required don’t have any time wasted on implementation. A good example of taking the wrong approach is quite a few leading CRM applications that have all the features that you could ever conceive, however in reality only 10 – 25% of these are ever used by an organisation. This makes the system over complicated, cumbersome and difficult to learn.
Conclusions
We have covered the difference between day to day computing concerns to long term value added projects. It is important as a business leader to understand that a balance needs to be achieved if the organisation is going to benefit from the valuable business tools that IT can provide. The tools that IT provide are essentially support to traditional team working methods and give the transparency needed to ensure all staff are on the same page regarding your strategic change initiative.
One of the most important considerations in implementing IT systems is the implications on staff and how the system will be used by them, for most organisations technology is necessary but not sufficient.
James Cook, CEO