It’s a Business Project, Not an I/T Project

By Steve Bloom, Owner/CEO, Pragmatek

Steve specializes in strategic planning and sales development for growth.

“Could you help our I/T department with a software selection project?”

I receive calls like this fairly often. Antiquated software running all or portions of a business may be holding it back. Yet the conversation really should start at how the struggling operation is currently running from a process standpoint.

Why?

Increase visibility to “as is” process inefficiencies

Pre-software selection is a perfect opportunity to map out business processes to help executives gain better visibility into how operations are running today. This is usually an eye-opening experience for the organization.

Once the current, “as is” process can be seen by everyone involved with it, such as Order To Cash, they are astonished with all the inherent “disconnects” that are slowing it down and adding cost. They also become aware of what each step/person is doing in the process. They quickly realize the inefficiency of the process, which no software can stop the floundering.

Improve processes to self-fund new software

It makes no sense to automate current, wasteful processes. Sure, you may need new software — but why buy software with the objective to automate the current state?

Rather, improve the current process first and use the hard-dollar savings to help purchase the new software. It’s a win-win proposition: automate a much leaner and cleaner way of serving the business purpose and self-fund the new software. In nearly all cases, this will help improve your customer’s experience with you as well.

So if you are looking for new software, ask yourself: "Could my current process be the underlying culprit to holding my business back?"

Remember: software selection is a business project, not an I/T project.