IT Strategy: Your Bridge Between Business Growth and IT

As business leaders we rely heavily on experts to provide us with the very best IT solution for our business. However, far too often these ‘experts’ advise us to buy expensive IT equipment by using serious technical jargon and only recommending their own products, which often leads to unnecessary costs and equipment. For this reason, IT suffers the reputation of being complicated and expensive.

Frequently ‘technical heads’ are put in charge of an IT strategy, even if they do not fully understand the commercial aspects of the business, its processes or its vision. Equally, there is often a lack of impartiality due to IT functions protecting their departments and IT companies needing to hit targets. Taking a step back from technology and looking at your business is a crucial step towards creating a strategy that will support your business planning.

There are a variety of considerations when creating your technology strategy. Overall it should at least compliment your business strategy, and in some cases it can even drive it.

 It’s all about business processes being enhanced by systems, not the reverse.

Outsourcing
This strategy offers an obvious solution to reducing your costs and ensures up to date knowledge from experienced specialists. A recent survey (1) revealed that three quarters of companies in the UK are now turning to outsourced providers to reduce their costs. Outsourcing can be a creative way to reduce your overheads, and can be managed to ensure that the correct supplier is sourced to deliver your business goals. However, there is a risk that your business plan is ignored in favour of cost savings. Always ensure that your IT strategy is working alongside your business growth plan.

Cloud Technology
Many businesses also benefit from using “the Cloud”, which comes in many forms, but is essentially a metaphor for the internet. It is the removal of your in-house technology infrastructure thus allowing you to host your desktops, information and systems on third party hardware. By doing so, your business can benefit from:

• Cost savings – you pay for what you use
• Higher availability and remote capability
• Decreased IT staffing costs or increased IT innovation
• Effectively backed up data
• A more effective disaster recovery plan.

You will see cost savings as result of less of a need for expensive server technology. Cloud users also benefit from spread payments, thus staggering your costs out over time and giving you more cash to develop your sales and marketing initiatives. How do you know that Cloud is the right strategy for your business?

Protecting your Business from Online Criminal Activity
Businesses continue to suffer from system abuse. Tougher economic climates often lead to increases in online criminal activity.

• More malicious code was created last year than in the history of cyber security. 
• 60% of all known internet threats were created in 2008.
• Spam equates to 78% of all emails sent.
• Virus’ are still a real issue, even with advances in anti-virus technology. 
• Businesses are still exposed to legal proceedings due to a lack of protection of the workforce from inappropriate web and email content.
• It is also often the case that the loss of staff results in the loss of company data, whether intended or not.
• All of these threats, coupled with the fact that many businesses are not effectively backing up their data or testing their backups, could lead to businesses at risk of significant if not permanent downtime.

CRM…It’s Not Just About Input, It’s About Output
Many businesses fail to map their business processes before purchasing their Customer Relationship Management system. This leads to the failure of CRM to achieve its objective. As well its traditional use as a system to interact with customers, the strategic use of CRM will at the very least:

• Improve and streamline your processes.
• Help you to manage your data proactively.
• Enable you to make decisions using management information collected from your system,

Effective CRM can grow business and even help build equity within it. It is often the most important project that an IT department will ever be responsible for implementing, and ironically will never actually use or understand the benefits of it. CRM can be used as a powerful, strategic tool, not simply a means for data mining.

Other Strategic Considerations
With so many challenges ahead, and so many technology choices, how can you make strategic, practical and risk-free decisions about your growth?

• How can you use your website to drive sales and enhance business processes?
• What is social media and what strategy could you adopt to grow your business? 
• Which mobile technology will help your business? 
• How can you protect your business now that it is remote / mobile? 
• How can you use systems to manage your staff’s activity?

It is critical that you receive impartial, practical and strategic advice on how best to use technological communications to drive your business forward.

If you have an appropriate and business-focussed technology strategy you will reap rewards earlier than most, and may even be stronger than when you entered this economic downturn.

Read our blog on web, technology and social media for recruiters and business.

We have some great clients - read their case studies and testimonials.

If you are growing your business, and would value strategic advice on how web, technology and social media could help, please get in touch.

(1) Ref: Pa Consulting Group 2009