Achieving Business Advantage Through Information Technology

1 PriceWaterhouseCoopers

Technology plays an important role in every business. It provides your people with the tools they need to do their jobs and it connects you to your customers, suppliers and partners. However, in many businesses, IT is still viewed as a necessary overhead rather than a strategic enabler.

How you think about IT dictates the value that can be gained from your investment. Technology touches every part of a business and as such, can have a significant impact on the way your business performs.

The systems you provide end-users will dictate productivity, the way systems are integrated determines the level of business insight that can be gained, and how you align your technology with business needs can drive agility, enable frictionless working and deliver an exceptional customer experience.

The reality is that, according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers,1 over 40% of businesses do not have an IT strategy in place, and therefore, are unlikely to be harnessing the true potential that technology offers. In this guide, we explore the different areas that can be positively impacted by technology when IT is considered a strategic enabler.

Introduction

1. Efficiency & ProductivityUK Productivity Statistics1 paint a bleak picture. The output per hour in the UK is 15% lower than the average for the G7 nations. We lag behind France by 22% and Germany by 25.6%.

Efficiency and productivity are not just statistics; they have a direct correlation to the profitability of your business.

The right technology can drive efficiencies across the business and improves the productivity of each individual. By leveraging Business Application Software that spans every part of the business or by integrating existing systems, information can traverse seamlessly through your organisation, processes can be be streamlined or automated, and you can significantly reduce duplication of effort.

By utilising the plethora of collaboration tools available you can leverage the collective power of your people, share corporate knowledge, and help teams work closer together to ensure things get done quicker.

Productivity can also be positively impacted by making sure that your technology just ‘works’. According to YouGov2 research, almost two thirds of UK employees believe that poor technology impacts their workplace productivity.

1 The FT - UK productivity lagging well behind G7 peers – ONS2 SmallBusiness.co.uk - Poor technology is hampering SMB worker productivity

Having immediate access to comprehensive management information not only allows you to make critical decisions faster, but it also enables you to make the right decision, first time. Gaining this holistic view of your business has to be incorporated by design; it rarely just happens.

A common challenge in organisations of all sizes is how to gain access to the information they need to get a comprehensive and accurate view of business performance. Critical data points and metrics are likely captured and held across multiple systems and need extracting and consolidating in spreadsheets; they seldom correlate and often the numbers are contradictory, seeding doubt.

Taking a strategic approach to IT is not just about ensuring the right technology is applied to each element of your business, it is also about ensuring that you are able to track and monitor what is important for your business. It is about gaining the business insights that allow you to continually improve operations, identify trends and guide the business accordingly and to ensure that you are empowered to make informed business decisions.

2. Business Insight

3. Customer ExperienceAccording to Walker research,1 by 2020 customer experience will overtake price and product as the main differentiator between competitors. Ensuring that you deliver frictionless and effective service to your customers is key to both retaining existing customers and attracting new ones.

With the likes of Amazon, Uber and Airbnb, we have all seen what is possible when organisations use technology to disrupt markets. Although your business may not have such large-scale ambitions, technology-enabled customer experience can become a key differentiator for you.

Your technology should not dictate how you do business; it should be the enabler of how you want to do business. Having applications that allow you to manage relationships, integrated systems to expedite order fulfilment, and a slick and highly effective technology-enabled approach to customer service across multiple channels can transform the customer’s perception of your business.

1 Customer 2020 – A Progressive Report. Walker

1 Office of National Statistics Research.

Work is no longer just a place where we go; it is an activity that we conduct in any location at any time. According to ONS1 statistics, over 4.2m people in the UK now work at least one day a week from home and analysts project that up to 50% of the workforce will work remotely by 2020.

Your IT infrastructure needs to extend beyond the boundaries of the office. You need to allow employees to work as effectively from home as they do from their desk, enable mobile access to key systems and data to support people on the move, and ensure that your multi-site business is fully integrated and streamlined.

For IT to become a business enabler, you must first remove any restrictions. Embracing mobile working will significantly increase productivity, enabling bring-your-own-device will have a positive impact on user experience, and moving to the cloud will greatly increase scalability and your ability to support ‘anywhere working.’

4. Mobility & Flexible Working

Business agility has become the new strategic imperative. According to research by the Economist Intelligence Unit, 90% of executives view agility as critical to future business success. According to MIT, agile businesses generate 30% higher profits than non-agile companies.

Agility spans every part of the business. Being able to react quickly to market or economic changes, being able to scale the business at speed and being able to adapt processes to respond to competitive threats are all characteristics of an agile business. Key to this is your technology; having systems that are scalable, that span every part of the business and can quickly be adapted to support change.

There are some simple steps you can take to build agility into your IT:

• Migrating infrastructure to the cloud breaks the capital investment cycle and enables you to have an infrastructure that is both scalable and flexible to the needs of the business.

• Taking advantage of the capabilities of cloud-based applications that come with a multitude of plugins and standard integration will provide the necessary flexibility to align with business needs.

• Utilising an IT services company to augment your existing team will relieve bottlenecks and inject specialist skills when required.

5. Business Agility

Your business is dependent on its IT infrastructure to operate. Failure is no longer just an inconvenience, but a major impact on your ability to run your business and to deliver on promises to your customers. It is essential that business continuity is part of your IT strategy and you have the capability and plans in place to take any potential failure in your stride.

Technology has advanced considerably in this area, making it possible for businesses of any size to take steps to reduce business risk and ensure that they have an adequate “Plan B” in place. Virtualisation allows you to remove dependency on any single piece of hardware, data replication solutions allow you to cost effectively protect against data loss, and the cloud can ensure your ability to do business without tying you to a specific building.

Business continuity is no longer about being able to recover from a disaster – it is about ensuring your business is always running. Whether you suffer a power outage, a loss of connectivity, a hardware failure or a cyber-attack, your business must continue to operate.

6. Business Continuity

Your business is dependent on its IT infrastructure and applications, as well as the information that these systems hold. Not only is this critical for business continuity, but you also have a responsibility to keep sensitive information about your customers, suppliers and employees safe.

With ever-increasing risk of cyber-attacks and data theft, you need to take Information Security seriously and take every viable step you can to protect the data you hold.

This includes ensuring that you control who has access to what data across your organisation, keeping data secure and where possible encrypted, and putting the right security applications to protect your environment in place.

Information Security is not just about protecting your environment, it is about being able to quickly detect and respond to a cyber-attack or data breach to minimise the impact to your business.

7. Business Security

Summary

If any aspect of this eBook resonates with you and what you are looking to achieve, then we would love to discuss this further with you. At Conosco, we focus on helping companies to gain advantage from their IT investment and would love to share our thoughts with you.

Drop us an email at sales@conosco.com or call the team on 020 3507 0418.

Technology is at the heart of your business and has a significant role to play in your current activities and future success. It should be driving operational efficiencies, enabling service excellence and empowering your leaders with the insight they need to drive and focus the business in the right direction.

Having an IT Strategy in place is key, but you also need to continually refine this Strategy to align with the changing needs and aspirations of the business.

At Conosco, we talk about the ‘IT Advantage’ – this is gained by having a clear plan of what you need IT to deliver for your business; as well as a roadmap that covers every aspect of what has been discussed in this eBook, including productivity, insight, agility, customer experience, mobility, business continuity and security.