FARMINGTON HILLS – During the dot-com era, just five short years ago, the answer was apparent: private equity and the grandeur of exorbitant wealth in the global financial markets fueled the innovative appetites of technologists and inventors to build technologies and systems that arguably had more sizzle than business value. The business learned from this and recoiled by re-organizing and treating IT tactically through a financial lens, forcing projects to vet against aggressive ROI metrics. This practice has stifled the potential of many organizations, albeit under the guise of corporate responsibility.
The most successful companies have strategically leveraged technology to empower their users to work anytime, anywhere, securely and at their own pace. For them, work is not a place, it?s an activity. These organizations have extend critical business systems throughout their supply chains, grown territorially with efficiency, and captured markets and customers that they did not have before.
Do not confuse strategy and vision with operations and tactics. Instead, review your business plan. What are your three, five and 10 year business plans? How do these goals and objectives manifest themselves with your customers? With your employees? Besides people, what else can most significantly drive and accelerate those plans? Do you measure employee productivity (revenue/headcount)? What if you could achieve your five and 10 year plans in four or eight years?
If you could transform your business from transaction, to interaction, would it improve your ?up-sell? capabilities and increase shrinking margins? Could you create more ?sticky? relationships with your customers? What if you could create subtle convinces for your customers that pushed more administrative tasks to them while improving their satisfaction and captivated their business processes? Would that reduce your cost of sales and improve your efficiency while blocking competition?
If these scenarios ?speak? to you, then believe it or not, the answer to the question is: Technology
The fundamental force behind IT Strategy could be: to empower the workforce with technology tools that enable real-time information, thereby creating competitive advantage in the marketplace and improving employee productivity.
A decade’s worth of technology innovation and the internet have transformed the workplace and empowered workers to do their jobs with greater speed, effectiveness and intelligence. Communicating with colleagues and sharing information, however, remains complicated. A unified communications architecture dramatically streamlines the way we communicate with fellow workers and the virtual team members throughout our supply chains.
Legacy communication technologies are a significant challenge in tomorrow?s universe. Today, you probably send and receive email, instant message with colleagues and friends, make phone calls from your desk and mobile telephones, and check messages in various email and voicemail boxes. You might participate in an audio conference call and web collaboration session, and schedule meetings with your calendaring application. Do you still send or receive faxes?
All of these point communication technologies, although intended to improve and accelerate our messaging capability have not. We are experiencing another proliferation of disconnected communications devices and applications that makes communicating more difficult and more time consuming. In an age when business success increasingly depends on how quickly people can share information, this is a critical business issue.
Unified communication technologies will eliminate the barriers between the communications modes of email, voice, web conferencing, instant messaging, etc. These technologies enable us to close the gap between the devices we use to contact people when we need information and the applications and business processes where we use that information. Immediately, this helps the business by shrinking many-step business process to fewer steps. The greater impact on productivity, creativity and collaboration is enormous. These technologies have the ability to improve the individual?s communications experience, thus rendering him more productive as well.
In terms of what the future holds for these technologies, the fusion of unified communications and business applications like CRM, ERP, etc. will lead to business process fusion inside your company first; shrinking response time and improving accuracy. Some time thereafter, the participants in your supply chain will have their communications and business applications fused to yours. Once the processes are streamlined throughout the supply chain and all of the possibilities are understood, the efficiencies gained are sure to be profound.
The tactical implementation of this strategy starts with a current state understanding of the technology platforms in the broadest sense: Network (Voice/Data/Video), Information Lifecycle Management (SAN) and messaging.
The balance of shared support and in-house services should be evaluated. A collection of vendors committed to the growth of your business by keeping it on the forefront of competitive advantage technologies should be given special consideration.
Duane Tursi is CEO of Netarx. For more information, click on Netarx.Com
