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Cost-Effective
IT: Planning, by Richard Sonnier Planning is a critical function in all aspects of business and IT is not different. Whether you are upgrading existing software or rolling out some of the new wireless networking technologies, planning will play a large role in your return on your IT investment. The major steps in the planning process are: 1. Identify your IT goals for the project or for the year. 2. Align your IT goals with your business goals. 3. Assess the current IT capabilities. 4. Design a new IT system to meet your goals. 5. Find the gaps between where you are today and your new system. 6. Create a project and budget to close the gaps. 7. Calculate the return on investment of the project. First, you need to determine goals: IT goals and business goals. You need to have a target if you want to hit it. The business goals are especially important since they will guide the size of the budget and provide the investment return. You want to think strategically. A new PC is fine, but an IT system to reduce cost or double revenues is much better. One recent client is planning an accounting software upgrade because by meeting the requirements of new potential customers he can triple his revenues. Next, you need to determine where your IT is today and then where it needs to be to meet the business goals. This can be very hard. It is difficult to keep up with all of your IT resources and even harder to envision a different system. Often an IT services company can do this much more effectively since they start fresh and just look at the environment objectively. Also, an outside firm will bring experience of many different solutions to the process of designing new system. Then, you perform Gap Analysis as the business consultants term it. You just map out the changes needed to move the current IT to the new design. Here you need to include all the company players in the process for several reasons: 1. To make sure you have not missed something. Often the new system is not real to people until you discuss specific changes needed for the new system. As it become more real, the users start thinking through all the issues that might come up. 2. To make sure that everyone is fully committed to the new system. 3. To determine the cost of the new system. The cost will be driven by these changes, not just cost of any new software or hardware. Finally, you need to calculate a return on investment of the project. If it is acceptable then the project goes forward, otherwise you repeat the process until it is acceptable. Next week, I will review some of the tough IT decisions facing businesses. |
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