The era of running your business with "GUT FEEL" or Speculations is going extinct in Nigeria. Neither will “Peer Pressure” effect of everyone is doing it so I must do it be any beneficial to any business.
Every business, small or big, need proper intelligence to fuel strategy to advance the business.
The influence of Information Technology (IT) and market opportunities on business and its effect on emerging small businesses is something for most business to give attention to. Information Technology (IT) has grown to be an essential component of any firm's strategy in the market place.
Information Technology has shown to be a transformation agent. Here, new technologies enable firms to radically transform their business, sometimes creating something that is unrecognizable as deriving from the former business.
The truth is, any business that is not embracing technology as a business enabler is doing business at its own peril.
Everyone will agree that business productivity can be traced to an organization's ability to successfully execute on overall strategy.
If execution of strategy is the key to a successful business — what are the steps to increasing your business productivity for greater execution on your strategic goals?
How do you know your business alignment and people performance are working at optimal levels to maximize business productivity resulting in the best possible results?
This is where information technology comes in. Information technology provides the bridge between strategy, execution and performance.
Using technology to maximize your business productivity creates the platform to realize true business success.
However organizations need to understand their own DNA and strategy, and with that know for certain when, how and where to use IT to leverage the business for optimal performance.
Information Technology should be a business success enabler, but we’ve seen that in recent times that IT departments are more of a cost center for many organization than business success enabler.
The cost of IT not commensurate with the value it delivers. Should it be so?
I strongly believe that there should be a science to what and how technology can be used to enhance which business process for maximal performance.
I also believe the very first question businesses should ask before spending money or time on technology is, “why am I doing this?” If there is not a core business benefit to be gained, why do it in the first place?
For IT to be maximized as a business enabler, business managers should invest time and money to answer the following:
1. Why is the technology needed and for which business process?
2. How much, comparatively in size and industry specificity, does go into IT spend in a financial year?
3. What costs should be considered to be part of your IT budget? These costs are broken down into several categories:
Initial cost - hardware and software, and training
Ongoing cost - maintaining systems, including licenses for proprietary software, hosting, and support.
Upgrade cost - cost of upgrades, and expected lifespan of systems/frequency of upgrades.
Value proposition - how much employee time will the system save? How much new business could the system generate?
Opportunity cost - how much potential revenue is lost by not implementing a system? What are your competitors doing in this area?
Risk - what are the risks of a particular system? What does it cost to mitigate those risks?
4. Where should you be spending the IT budgets? Should you spend most of your technology budget on infrastructure, hosted applications, custom line-of-business applications, or what? The answer to this depends a lot on your industry, but even more on your specific business.
5. When should you spend on technology and to what extent? Technology has a cost not just in dollars, but also in the time you and your employees need to spend adapting to it.
6. Who? You need to decide who to help you implement technology in your business. Will you do it yourself? Do you purchase an off-the shelf product? Do you use free software? Do you hire a programmer to create a custom system? Do you use a hosted system? Do you hire a consultant to help?
In conclusion, a strong plan for use of technology should be a part of every business plan, and re-evaluated whenever taking a strategic look at a business. Technology is both a cost of doing business, and an opportunity to do more business.
I think it's time for CIOs and business managers to take a step back and look at the big picture of technology in business.
Bola Adisa is an IT Business Analyst based in Lagos Nigeria. He currently leads the West Africa sub-region, out of Lagos Nigeria, for a premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications and consumer technology markets.
