Some months ago I was on a flight sitting besides the owner of an SME who develop various IT solutions for niche markets. We started to chat and the conversation flowed into my in-flight neighbor discussing his company’s organisation structure and his consideration of the different business units.
‘I always take care of my Sales people’, he confided rather brashly, ‘they make me money’ – well that left me pondering for a while some days after we parted.
All the often we see today, IT being viewed by many as an overhead, a cost-centre. Sometimes to the extent of being nothing more than a ‘necessary evil’! There are those who fail to understand why IT budgets keep growing and what IT do anyway.
Hence it would be prudent to devote this blog post to go over some of the areas where IT supports businesses today. This generic or high level overview illustrates how pervasive IT has become. Such that all-the-often, you’re not even aware that the service you’re using was provided and was being supported by IT!
In this exemplar, consider a typical, medium to large-sized organisation & how IT facilitates and supports the business processes upon which it relies:
- The employee comes into work and switches on their PC or laptop; it boots up with access to the company intranet and portal, along with access to the business email and office productivity applications.
- The sales staff have a number of channels to reach out to customers such as shops, on-line sales and a mobile sales teams; IT provides electronic systems for automating the capture process, following sales and at the backend, generating management reports. IT provide a Customer Care system where each customer’s purchases and communications are logged diligently. Follow up calls with the customer are faster and smoother as the salesperson can access historical information. This ensures improved customer satisfaction and improves retention as the customer feels the company pay more attention to her personal needs.
- Executive management use an IT supported system for corporate KPI delivery, meanwhile the Projects units use a collaborative project control system for checking against agreed milestones and deliverables.
- Marketing use social networking to help raise brand awareness and receive analytical data from IT to help analyse customer trends. In addition, the Marketing department use the company website for describing the company’s products and services.
- The Finance department use applications hosted within the IT environment which enable effective budgeting and accounting. Invoice administration and payments are supervised using an application which interfaces with the company email system, for sending automatic notification reminders to the respective people.
- Contracts and Procurement use an application which governs the lifecycle of the relationship with vendors. Potential vendors can register through a secure web interface and submit quotations and communicate thru this system. The whole system resides incidentally in a Data Centre managed by IT.
- Business communications with corporate bodies used to be taken care of thru email, but these are now followed using an automated system which has some powerful search and tracking capability.
- HR handle employee services using a workflow tool that handles everything from training requests to providing an information portal for staff to access their salary information and so on. The Administration unit have rolled ERP modules using the same solution for directing requests for business trips and also to manage medical claims.
- IT provide a Help Desk which acts as the single point of contact for staff facing issues related to IT services and also provide first-line support to the retail outlets and the mobile sales force who are now working nationwide, so need diligent remote support.
Within IT, we need to take the time out to be ambassadors of the value we bring today; this is an area where investing more is no longer a luxury.
Regards,
Musab Qureshi
