Think before you cut back on IT

Why do we put up with computers and all the problems they create and the expense of them when we are trying to cut costs? Shouldn’t we just throw them away and do without them?

I get this sentiment from people all the time. As a business owner I share the emotions, but as a manager, I know better.

We run a business that tracks thousands of job tickets. Each job ticket must be worked on by multiple people to pass from admin to technical to finance and on to the client as an invoice or statement. I know that each ticket has an administrative cost to it. My aim as a business owner is therefore to have more tickets handled faster by fewer people.

So my aim is to use computers to manage tickets more efficiently. The more the process can be automated, the better my profits will be. The faster my technicians can access information, the quicker they can resolve issues.

By resolving issues faster they reduce the cost of each issue and make us a better company to work with.

We also use computers to generate marketing material and to track client communications and sales conversations. All in all, we gain a lot from computers.

If our computers fail we simply cannot keep track of all the tasks and cannot process the volume of data our business must handle. Even a 20% decrease in efficiency would cause us to lose many clients and would certainly increase our costs to the point where we could no longer remain a viable business.

So the decisions for us are simple – spend as much as we need to on IT to be able to process our work at a rate that keeps us in business.

I suggest you quiet your emotional noise for a while, and look at the systems in your business that do run on computers or could run on computers, and work out the real cost in dollars per hour for the people that perform those tasks and think about how much more effective your business would be if that process were better automated.

Don’t get hung up on how you would automate it – that is a job for IT experts. Just figure out what processes you have that could be or should be automated or improved, and you will find how you can use IT in a downturn to improve your business.

David Markus is the founder of Melbourne’s IT services company Combo. His focus is on big picture thinking to create value in IT systems for the SME sector.