It’s as simple as that. But, if you’ll forgive the pun, IT’s not as simple as that. Which is why I’m in my business, and you’re in your’s.
Let me explain. I don’t know how to run a logistics operation, an insurance company, or a manufacturing plant. Whatever your business is, you know how to run it. And because you know how to run it you know how to monitor your market, identify new opportunities and recognise the changes you may need to make in order to benefit from those openings. Or, you will know of legislative or industry compliance issues that are forcing changes upon you.
But, and this a brutal comparison, suppose as Managing Director of a manufacturing business you learn that a truck in your distribution fleet has broken down. Even if you’re a weekend petrol head, and indeed assuming you have the time, you’re still not likely to go down to the depot, borrow a tool box and fix it. Are you?
And so it is with IT You, your board, and possibly your change management consultants, will have identified necessary changes. They will have been set against your new, changed, objectives. Each of you, including your operational IT team, will have brought your specific expertise to bear on the issues.
But this is a world of increasing specialisms. You probably see it in your own current operations. How many individual tasks, or even departments, were not part of your structure a decade ago?
Now, come the time to effect the changes, it’s essential that you engage the increasingly clearly defined, specific, expertise of a practitioner in leveraging that change through the most appropriate IT solution.
In today’s commercial environment it’s unlikely that any significant development in your operation will not need an objective appraisal of your current IT. It’s not about the changes themselves nor, ultimately, the marketing, or any other reasons to be where you need to be. It’s about how to get you there.
Informed, but objective, guidance on your IT infrastructure, to allow the changes to take place, and be put into daily operation is a valuable and effective tool.
And I’m the man with the toolbox. So don’t borrow it. Let me fix the lorry.