Technology & Life Sciences
Efficient Operations Through Managed IT Spending
By Todd Atteberry, Manager, IT Consulting Group
Many of today’s companies spend too much money on technology that ultimately doesn’t serve their needs. It’s easy to see why this happens—especially for fast-growing companies—but it doesn’t have to be that way. As a company grows, its corresponding needs become increasingly complex. During this time, organizations often acquire technologies in a disjointed fashion, resulting in isolated data, inefficient operations and missed key processes, like change management or integration.
To avoid this common pitfall, a company must take the time to look at their operations, the company’s mission, and the current state of technology. Once you have a thorough understanding of your company as a whole, you can create a plan that will increase automation, reduce overhead, improve efficiency and integrate and empower information. Keep in mind that you should have a five year plan, with the first two years focusing on a tactical set of projects.
This plan needs to address four key areas:
- People: skill sets, capacity and training plans, ensuring your organization is staffed appropriately
- Process: make your business processes more efficient
- Organization: organizational structure and readiness for change
- Technology: hardware, software and infrastructure integration, elimination of ad hoc databases, reporting, and automation
Bear in mind that the planning process is both top down and bottom up, involving all departments and all levels across the organization in order to build organization-wide support. Effective strategic planning for increased technology ROI is a skill set that develops through exposure and experience. The specific IT and strategic planning knowledge and experience you need may not currently exist in your organization. If not, you will likely find the use of external consultants to be the most effective way to help your organization through this process. Whatever course of action you take, the end game is the same: solutions to meet your needs, and strengthen your sovereignty and self governance.
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