I am afraid that my reaction is to say: "Wake up Australian business owners – this country is falling behind in taking advantage of productivity tools and technology that have been around for years!" As a nation, we seem to be so afraid of investing in technology that we are persisting with tools that could be updated for a relatively small spend, relative to our salary bills.
Among the many exciting technology advancements taking place, there are some great things happening with Virtual PCs that may be of interest to some of the larger businesses with a distributed workforce – especially with Citrix releasing its new XenApp 6 about now. This technology promises to simplify the desktop virtualisation model in a number of interesting ways, moving the choice of five solutions down to a one solution fits all model. This will make desktop virtualisation an affordable reality for much smaller organisations.
Of course, we could grab this technology and try to find a business problem to solve with it, investing a lot of money on training our IT staff, buying equipment and licensing. Or, we could do some analysis of our business, figure out what tools the business needs and invest in those.
In the SME space, we are being very slow to adopt some of the following technologies that would give our business significant benefit:
- Sales automation
- Marketing automation
- Information management
- HR management
- Process and financial management (ERP)
These solutions help us to:
- Bring in work more effectively.
- Automate mundane tasks so they happen reliably and produce dependable results.
- Structure our data so we can manage it and report on it effectively.
- Manage our staff with well-structured company-wide objectives.
- Keep track of our stock and other resources.
- Reduce waste and drive better processes.
Part of the problem is that many owners of SME businesses simply don't have time to get out any more. Trade show attendee numbers are on the decline, and it is harder than ever to get people to attend events. Direct mail and email marketing has been overdone, so it is very hard to catch the attention of a business leader to introduce a new idea (or technology).
Of course, there are risks to implementing new solutions too, and I don't want to gloss over those. A new system will cost a lot of money, and may not provide any benefit. Or, the implementation may go badly and just add expense to solving the business problem. And then, a new technology may emerge just around the corner that is better than the one you've just implemented; making the one installed a complete waste of time and resources. Or, your business may need to change direction in a way the new solution does not support, making the business less flexible rather than more productive.
Therefore, the quality of the business analysis done before investing is key to your upgrade. I see a lot of businesses hiring a business mentor to assist with driving profitability or growth, but I do not see business mentors helping create IT systems for productivity. As a result, there is a huge opportunity in our SME business community for business analysts to step in and help build productive businesses for the next decade. If there are any analysts out there focused on the 15 to 150 seat space, I would love to hear from you.
So, the missing element may well be the team of roving CIOs for organisations too small to employ a full-time CIO.
I hope the emerging trend is to stop looking at new technology, and instead look internally at the business issues. Once the business issues have been identified, ask the people who work with technology every day across multiple industries to resolve those issues with the best available technology. And, as always, it is important to build a relationship with an advisor you can trust.
David Markus is the founder of Combo - the IT services company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth.
Hi David
ReplyDeleteI know you met with Matt from Pragmetric last week - I'm Andrew, and I work with Matt. Getting validation of our very business model from someone such as yourself is very gratifying!
As you know, Pragmetric provides the very service you're talking about when you say "So, the missing element may well be the team of roving CIOs for organisations too small to employ a full-time CIO.". Pragmetric provides Fractional CIO level support, with offerings designed to fit the needs of most SMEs that lack full time/internal CIO resource, and we offer these either for a limited period, to get the organisation over a particular finish line, or on an on-going basis.
We find that with our breadth of exposure across the industry, we can offer expert knowledge that is broader than any but the best informed CIOs - we simply deal with more vendors and providers than anyone who works for just one company would have a need to. This helps us make decisions that are based on our direct experience rather than the (sometimes empty) promises of the business development folks. As we continue on and grow, we know that this knowledge base will grow along with us.
Interestingly, we also find that many IT Service Providers realise significant value from us engaging with their clients. Sure, we might make things a little harder for them in some regards, but we also make sure that their clients know how to be good IT customers, help them have clear engagement models, and generally find that this benefits all parties in the relationship.
One of the major points of difference between us and a more general IT Service Provider is that we don't sell anything else - just the Fractional CIO services we provide. No hardware (that's what the vendor is for), no added services, no markups padding our bottom line. Our advice is given with the client's best interests firmly in mind - we're on their side.
Our focus is on the intelligent application of appropriate technology. We work hard to be aware of IT 'best practice' across all relevant sub-specialities, but also strive to deliver 'business sensible' solutions, to keep IT plans in line with business goals. We seek to be, for the IT space, the "advisor you can trust" if you're an SME owner/manager.
As far as we know, we're the only company providing this service here in Australia, and we're looking forward to continuing to grow.
Hopefully this response isn't too heavy on the marketing side of things :)
andrew@pragmetric.com
http://pragmetric.com/