It surprises me just how often I am asked the question, "What's the bottom line?" I get this query from everyone from new prospects with a 5-user network to military leaders with a 4000-user enterprise and everyone in between. Well for everyone out there, here's the answer...

 

"You tell me what the bottom line is."

 

I say this because like so many other aspects of your business, like sales, marketing and operations, IT is a process NOT a product. It is not something which can be merely purchased and then expected to work forever or in many cases expected to work at all. There are a lot of obstacles which stand in the way of deploying a new system. Many people are surprised to hear that the setup and integration of technology is the SMALLEST problem.

 

For example, it is fairly easy to pay a consultant X dollars for Y hours to set up a SharePoint server. However, unless knowledge management becomes a part of your corporate culture then you'll never experience any of the system's benefits, such as collaboration and workflow management. The consultant may have set everything up right and even trained your users, but unless it becomes "the way you do business", then you'll never receive a positive ROI from your investment.

 

We all wish that our employees cared about our profits, expenses, efficiency and quality, and to some degree they do. But let's face it, for the most part so long as their paycheck keeps coming, they really only care about what's on TV tonight or what they're doing this weekend. Due to this, most employees just want to clock in, do their work to the best of their ability, clock out and go home. In general, they just prefer to maintain the status quo and this is a big problem in any organization. New technology and new business processes signify change. Even if it is for the good of the company and the good of the employee, it still represents a learning curve which must be overcome. Proper management of change including organizational adaptability and user adoption are, by far, the biggest challenges to face a new technology implementation.

 

OK, so now your new system is up and running, it's been integrated into your business processes and you've achieved your goals of increased efficiency, lower costs, higher profits and better decision support. Mission accomplished right? No, this is merely the first step along the path of success.

 

Since assets and uncontrolled processes degrade over time, it is imperative that both be monitored, maintained and IMPROVED. If you purchased a company car, would you drive it until the engine seizes or would you change the oil and perform other preventative maintenance? Of course you would choose the later, but many business owners “drive it ‘til it dies” with their IT assets. The failure rate for every IT system or component is 100%. That means that given enough time anything and everything will eventually break. This then erodes the ROI for that system through tangible costs, such as repairs and employee downtime, and intangible costs, such as operational inefficiencies. This, of course, can typically be avoided through a proactive management plan which will identify problems before they become catastrophic failures.

 

So again let me say, "You tell me the bottom line." Don't make IT a project; something you do every now and again. Only when you make it an inseparable part of your daily operations will you experience the true value that IT brings to your organization.