Are You Treating IT Like a Cost of Doing Business?

by Scott M. Lewis

IT and technology. Everyone would agree that in today’s business world, they are critical to the success of an organization — or at least you would think so. As I travel around the country speaking with business owners or the employees in charge of technology resources for their companies, I am at times surprised by their perspective of IT and the role it has in the success of their organization.

Let’s look at the roles and some of the responsibility that IT has within your business. You have to remember it is the business of IT. Yes, it is a business, and the decisions you make regarding IT can be long-lasting and have a financial impact on your business for years to come. IT’s roles include:

• Governance. The governance model is based on IT providing an operational parameter for departments and operational units that use the network and devices on the network. Governance also refers to providing a workflow model that integrates business rules including security, data assurance and management of the network in compliance with software rules and industry standards.

• Infrastructure. This is the hardware component of the business of IT. There can be many layers of operation depending on the configuration of your network, which in today’s world might have to include the use of cloud-based technologies, mobile technologies, and remote or home-base users. However, when you take into consideration from a hardware perspective what it takes to run a network, you can’t overlook the complexity of how these systems all work together to provide a productive environment for your employees.

• Functionality. The most visible area of technology management is the functionality. This includes application availability, software development, data awareness, data backups, disaster recovery and business continuation. In most cases this is the area that affects end users the most. Business owners must ask themselves, “Are systems allowing employees to work in a productive manner, and is the data safe and secure?”

Risk awareness and mitigation is another area that seems to be overlooked when it comes to the role IT plays. However, when you look at risk, you have to look at preventable, strategy, internal and external risks.

Many preventable risks are associated with poor corporate habits that are typically known but go unaddressed. They might be cultural, caused by a desire for a friendly work environment or accepted because the ownership doesn’t view the risk as something that would cause severe damage to the organization. Preventable risks often go on for years because of the lack of money allocated to mitigate them until the inevitable happens and a risk becomes a litigation action instead of an inconvenience.

Strategy risks happen when an organization voluntarily accepts risks because they perceive them as worth the rewards. According to the Wall Street Journal, a survey asked many C-level individuals what they viewed as the biggest strategy risks in the future. The top responses included:

• Overconfidence bias. This has many factors when it comes to IT. Executives can overestimate their own knowledge and ability, but a higher risk is that they overestimate the ability, knowledge and expertise of those they have entrusted to oversee the IT operations of their business. I have written many times on the risk of having the wrong individuals managing or overseeing IT and have seen the impact of these decisions on companies.

• Availability bias. This is when a C-level individual overrates the likeliness or importance of things they have read about or seen on television, not considering the reality of the overall impact of a good story versus the reality of the risk expected.

• Confirmation bias. This is when an executive wants to make the information fit based on their beliefs instead of new factual information and fails to realize the impact that information is going to have on preset expectations around risk and IT management.

• Optimism bias. This — thinking that things will simply work out as intended — is seemingly the riskiest of all. When it comes to managing IT, optimism bias can be risky and expensive.

Are you treating IT as a cost of doing business? If so, you are not doing your business any favors. The ever-changing technology landscape means you have to pay attention to the role of IT and the expertise it takes to manage and run IT as part of your business, not a cost of doing business.

The business of IT can take years to learn and is an ongoing educational growth model as business and technology change. IT has turned itself into a very specialized business, and part of that specialization is the overall management of IT based on the business, not the nuts and bolts of IT.
If you consider IT a cost of doing business, then you will lose the edge of using technology as a weapon of competitiveness in the marketplace.

Scott Lewis is the president and CEO of Winning Technologies Group of Companies, which includes Liberty One Software. Scott has more than 30 years of experience in the technology industry and is a nationally recognized speaker and author. He has worked with businesses to empower them to use technology to improve work processes, increase productivity and reduce costs. Winning Technologies’ goal is to work with companies on the selection, implementation, management and support of technology resources. Learn more about Winning Technologies at www.winningtech.com or by calling 877-379-8279.