Is Technology Running Your Business?

It is very typical in running a business today to be inundated with requests from all corners of the company for new technologies. The market and our employees are constantly telling us that we must stay on top of the technology curve in order to remain competitive. With the rapid changes in technology it becomes harder and harder to do so.

Since the advent of personal computers and other affordable computer systems, purchase decisions have often been distributed to individual departments and business units. This occurred mostly because the centralized IT groups, who were historically responsible for the company's computing strategy, were focused exclusively on critical corporate computing needs and relegated user requests for non "mission critical" applications to an ever increasing backlog of projects. Departmental and personal computing provided an avenue for these business groups to take ownership of solving their own business needs and reducing the dependency on the central IT groups. At the same time this led to a disjointed computing environment. Today, these same users and departments are advocating new business models and technologies such as the extensive use of the Internet and intranet technologies.

The delegating of purchasing and technology decision-making responsibility was allowed because it relieved real business problems and allowed work to proceed at a faster pace. This worked well as long as those who were driving it were technically responsible and were willing to find the support they needed on their own. This strategy was a big win when departments cooperated in building cohesive solutions to technology initiatives. Unfortunately, this was often not the case.

Companies have found that the cost of supporting and maintaining distributed systems is much higher than that of the old centralized computing environment. This is not surprising since there are now hundreds or thousands of systems to support and manage. Also, since these systems are by their nature "personal" computers, they are not designed for centralized management and support. Tactically, the computer industry has risen to the challenge and provided more "products" to solve aspects of managing these systems.

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Throwing technology at a problem

It is very easy to be caught up in the marketing hype of the computer industry. It seems that every software or hardware company has a wide array of solutions for your business and can show you how their products can solve your problems. Increasingly, it is a "buyer's market" -- meaning that it is up to the purchaser to buy the right product for their needs. As buyers of technology, we are overwhelmed with features and benefits.

With all of the changes in technology over the last twenty years, it is very difficult to understand the full ramifications of choosing a software or hardware product until after you have been using it for some time. Since many computer products are relatively "inexpensive," the decision to purchase "perceived" solutions to problems is very easy to make. We are often doing this based on a list of "check-off" items with which the product must comply. It is rare that we have the time to fully understand how well these products implement these "check-off" items, the ramifications of using the products or even if the products meet our requirements for the "check-off" item. Often what is thought to be a total solution is only a partial solution and you are required to purchase additional products or customize your environment to gain a more complete solution. Once we have started down a path of buying products to solve a problem, a cycle often emerges causing us to buy more and more related products in an effort to get everything we need to solve our business problems. This further escalates by our changing business practices (often moving away from what is optimum for our business or our clients), allowing the products to define what we can and can't do.

This is a never-ending problem. Until you are prepared to break the cycle, technology will run your business. The problem is further compounded in high-growth periods by the fact that companies are often successful (for a period) despite their use of technology and not because of it. Fundamentally, you need to ask:

Are we purchasing the right technology for our business requirements or are we allowing the technology to define how we run our business?

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Taking back control of your computing strategies

So the question is--

How do we enable our business needs to drive our technology strategies and insure that the investment we make in computers and related systems solves those needs?

The solution is not glamorous -- we must first have a detailed understanding of the business requirements and priorities and then look for technology that addresses these needs. We must focus on understanding how we are going to measure the success of a technology before we latch onto the solution. This seems obvious at one level but it is all too easy to worry about a perceived solution to the problem before fully understanding what you are trying to accomplish. Another obstacle is that often there are no off-the-shelf solutions and you are then faced with building a custom solution.

The other aspect of taking back control of your computing strategy is to understand the technology and the capabilities and limitations of individual products. A part of this process is understanding that the technology changes and that you will have to devise a strategy that allows you to easily incorporate these changes. Therefore, questions of how these changes will be integrated and how you will support the technology need to be included in the strategy.

Then with the clear understanding of both the business objectives and the capabilities of the technology solid computing strategies can be developed that provide a foundation on which to offer computing solutions. A clear objective of a computing strategy will be to select standards on which to build the strategy. These standards (e.g. TCP/IP, SMTP, HTTP, SQL, SNMP) insure interoperability and provide a vendor-independent method of product selection. Now begins the arduous task of evaluating products and tools on which solutions will be built. The primary goal of this task is to insure that you are in the right "class" of technology that will address your business requirements. Once you have narrowed the selection to a single class of products, the selection criteria become more business related. It is likely that you will have similar levels of customization regardless of the product selection.

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Guidelines for building a strong computing strategy

• Understand the business problems and objectives (both short-term and long-term)
• Select "standards" with which the technology selections will need to comply
• Define supportability and interoperability requirements
• Define performance and scalability objectives
• Understand the capabilities and limitations of chosen technology
• Account for changes in technology in the strategy
• Architect an environment capable of supporting current and future business needs
• Focus on automation of workflow and not task automation
• Run automated functions where you gain optimum advantage (are these functions hosted on clients or servers?)
• Assume that business requirements will change over time
• Plan for success
• Build solutions that satisfy the requirements
  of all users, including:

  Corporation
  End-user
  Customer
  Support group

Aligning business and technology

A fundamental requirement in the effort to take back control of your business is to insure that when a technology solution is suggested it meets your critical business needs and objectives. Make sure that you know how you are going to measure the success of the technology solution and that this criteria is measuring what is important to you and your company. Technology is a tool to be used to aid you in achieving your business objectives, and although it is a part of the solution, it is not the solution. It is imperative that you understand how to effectively use these technology tools and that you choose technologies that truly give you the power to be successful.

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