Here's a business strategy that should be familiar to every reader. When business is good, you invest in IT to improve the company's operations, service levels, and competitiveness. When business is bad, you freeze or cut the IT spend.
You want to-you need to-do more with your information technology, but you're not sure the time is right to warm up the IT budget. And you also know that getting the timing wrong could cede competitive advantage.
It's a real high wire act. To help our readers keep their balance, we asked customers, solution providers, and other experts to share recommendations for how small- and medium-sized enterprises can best manage their IT budgets today.
We found six common themes that will help you better capitalize on your current IT investment, and keep your company well-positioned for strategic improvements down the road.
No. 1: Embrace the Consumerization of ITThe "consumerization of IT" is a trend predicted by Gartner analysts several years ago and now in full swing. It describes how companies can help lower costs and increase productivity by capitalizing on popular consumer technology their employees, customers, and partners are already using. Think smartphones, tablets, Web apps, social networks and mobile networks.
Consider how many employee-bought-and-owned smartphones and tablets are being used by your people to get their work done anywhere, anytime. Think about how many staffers are using "unauthorized" collaboration and communication tools such as Skype, instant messaging, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and mobile apps to help achieve business objectives.
That said, it's likely the proliferation of non-commissioned consumer devices, apps, and mobile networks is making your company's IT leaders fret over over legitimate management, security, and governance concerns. But savvy business leaders say there is rich strategic opportunity in consumerization and that cannot be ignored.
They point to lower IT acquisition and maintenance costs (after all, employees are footing some or all of the bill, and end-user support is almost always accomplished with a self-service model). The workforce becomes more productive, because they're using their favorite devices and user experiences, and the devices are inevitably mobile, adding more available hours to the workday.
Imagine if you could help address the cost of desktop or laptop computers, much of the software, and a chunk of your mobile network infrastructure. We're not there yet, but we're moving closer with the proliferation of iPhones, iPads, and competing devices from Google, BlackBerry, and Microsoft-nearly all which have been ushered into the enterprise by users.
The secret to capitalizing on the productivity and mobility benefits of consumerization is to do more than tolerate the trend. Actively embrace it. Go beyond mobile e-mail and documents by giving your people access to the mission-critical information assets that help them do their jobs.
The result: Driving higher productivity, engagement, and service levels. Happier customers and employees. All while helping trim or eliminate device, software, and network costs once considered a necessary evil.
No. 2: Sail to the Cloud
Software in the cloud-also known as "SaaS" (software as a service), "on-demand" apps, or "cloud computing"-provides an effective and highly affordable alternative to on-premise business applications for small businesses, medium-sized enterprises, and subsidiaries of larger organizations.
Served up securely over the Internet, software in the cloud has tremendous advantages over traditional, on-premises solutions. These include rapid (often instant) deployment, up-front costs that can be much lower and predictable (for example, no hardware or other data center investments are required), faster and broader user adoption, and virtually no IT support required.
The result can be a perfect storm of benefits for cash-conscious SMEs, giving the business more freedom, flexibility, agility. Companies that go to the cloud now may find their IT staff is suddenly free to focus on strategic initiatives that help grow the business, instead of care and feeding of servers, patches, and upgrades on site. And as more scale, features, or capabilities are needed, they can be powered up in a snap, without requiring more people, time and hardware.
No. 3: Get Smart about Business Intelligence
Another big IT trend is "Big Data." It's also a big IT problem.The amount of data we're generating around the globe is spiraling out of control. It's growing faster than we can understand it.
Data will increase 44-fold by 2020, according to a recent IDC report covered by Computerworld. Information overload is a threat to productivity and competitiveness, because it dramatically reduces your ability to find, analyze and exploit opportunities.
Unfortunately, many SMEs today attempt to gain business intelligence by aggregating spreadsheets and passing them around in e-mail and at meetings. That might have been a workable approach 10 years ago, but it's woefully inadequate today.
Instead, SMEs can gain insights that help contain costs and drive revenues with BI technology that makes short work of managing, visualizing, analyzing, and reporting on "big data." This gives employees an up-to-the-minute, unified view of how the business is performing on key metrics. And it gives company leaders the intelligence to make sound decisions in real time.
BI technology was once available only to the largest enterprise organizations. Today it makes good business sense for SMEs with just one million in revenue.
Big data is only getting bigger. No matter what BI solution you choose, the time is now to explore how BI can help you get your arms around your business, and maximize your company's potential-your workforce, your customer knowledge, your supply chain, and more-to help squeeze every ounce of profitability out of day-to-day activities.
No. 4: Plan, Plan, Plan
When it comes to technology budgeting and procurement, planning is all too often overlooked, skimped on or handed off to vendors and consultants.
It's crucial to take the reins of your IT planning, and own the inputs, decisions, and outputs. Start with a clearly defined, realistic scope of your requirements, what you want to accomplish, your budget and your timeline. This is the only time-tested way to address new business requirements or technology trends, and help ensure the success of any IT project.
If you have vague goals, variable budget ranges, shifting scope or are chasing a tech trend "because it is there," it's likely you have a poor understanding of your requirements. You won't be able to accurately estimate the time and effort required to successfully complete the project. Go back to the drawing board and prioritize what must be accomplished and when, based on current business needs and the budget.
No. 5: Put Your IT Vendors Under the MicroscopeMany exceptional IT products and services are designed first for large enterprises, and then scaled down for small- and mid-sized businesses. These demo well and appear to be affordable. And who can deny the quality and effectiveness of a product or service that's being used by some of the largest companies in the world?
For SMEs that don't put their vendors under a microscope, reality can set in fast. They discover their IT spend keeps growing, milked by seemingly endless follow-on customizations required to force-fit an enterprise solution into an SME's world.
SMEs should expect-indeed, demand-software that's ready to go right out of the box, reasonable deployment times, and superb implementation partners with a proven track record of completing projects similar to the one you are scoping.
Gartner outlines four core practices that the best IT vendors offer SMEs. They must:
Demonstrate clear business value of their IT solutions;
Design IT solutions with resource constraints in mind;
Create flexible sourcing, pricing, and deployment options;
Deliver quality after-sales service and support.
Choosing the right solution provider does more than let your organization benefit from their experience, capabilities, and guidance. It means they have the right technical skills, business knowledge, automation capabilities, discipline and cultural sensitivity to the project.
And most important, it means they understand your industry, and can prove that with industry-specific domain experience. That is the best way to help reduce your team's learning curve, and steer clear of potentially deadly budget issues.
No. 6: Manage IT Projects JudiciouslyEffective IT project management is one of the oldest budget-boosters in the book. And it's also among the most overlooked.
Endemic among SMEs is delivering IT services with a small staff and limited skills. The IT team is often challenged to keep up with business demands and tech trends. These common resource constraints can put even simple IT projects at risk, extending timelines and expanding budgets.
Even the most technically sophisticated IT vendors can't succeed without a strong commitment from the client's management team. Consequently, the onus is on you, the SME, to drive the project from the inside out. This isn't as demanding as it sounds, but it is a crucial component for success.
It means having the right C-level executives sponsoring the project, and the right implementation staff-often a mix of IT and line-of-business personnel-that interfaces daily with your IT vendor's team.
It's hard not to get excited about technology's potential to create new strategic opportunities for your business. But with the explosion of new devices, apps, data, platforms and providers, it's never been more important to vet the vendors you're considering.
Take a top-down management approach to be certain that projects you implement will achieve your business objectives, on a timeline and budget that makes sense for your company.
