AKIBIA'S PRACTICAL GUIDE TO ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY
Monday, August 03, 2009
Preparing for a Return to Growth? It’s Not Too Soon to Make Process Improvements
Recently my Gartner sales rep forwarded me a research note regarding steps to take to “Prepare for a Return to Business Growth.” Now, Gartner’s note (subscription required) falls short of Newsweek’s prediction that the recession is over, but they do make the good point that we must prepare for the time when delayed projects come off the shelf and back into our IT plans.
While the idea of “planning” for a return to growth is exciting, it’s important to remember we should still plan for a different approach to IT than we took in years past. Don’t expect to return to the same budgets and processes that you leveraged before the recession. Instead take time today to focus on identifying savings and increasing efficiency gains in your processes to ensure a more cost effective implementation when the next projects do role out.
So in the meantime consider things like:
- Evaluating existing infrastructure to see how current investments can be further leveraged
- Vendor management – ensure multiple, competitive bids and commitment to performance metrics from your vendors
- Process improvements – take a hard look at the process for identifying and implementing new IT projects. Is the process as efficient as possible and does it ensure that the new projects will deliver ROI?
In essence, the work you do now will enable you to accomplish those projects—once green lighted—for fewer dollars than before. This ensures faster time to ROI, as well as positioning IT as a lean and nimble organization to executives.
