Less IT, More Growth™

Does the IT capability you have in place feel like a dead weight around your leg, holding your business back from being all it can be? While you grow, does it seem more and more that limitations in your IT are holding you back?


Growth is good – and that can lead to IT solutions to achieve improved productivity. But it can also lead to a vicious cycle of costly, failed attempts to improve.


The more IT you have, the more complexity you introduce. The more complexity you introduce, the more skills are required to maintain the environment. The more skills that are required to maintain the environment, the more costly the environment becomes. Making matters worse, complexity is exacerbated when you keep growing and the decisions to address this growing problem are postponed.


Because of this complexity factor, business owners of emerging companies are facing a huge dilemma when it comes to deciding how and where to invest in IT. The promise of improved productivity often leads to the curse of complexity, higher costs and restrained growth. Have you seen this in your business?


So is less IT, more? And can growth be accelerated with less IT? Yes!


Your emerging business almost certainly faces the same kinds of challenges as large enterprises except that you've got fewer dollars to work with. Nonetheless, limited automation capabilities, the lack of streamlined processes and systems, poor quality data, and a gap in feature/function sets, can be huge impediments to your business growth.


Without a course correction in IT, you'll discover that you’re not going to be able to scale and grow your business without adding more hardware and heads. But the challenge is that choosing to invest in more IT invokes the "curse of complexity", which proves costly in the long run.


So reducing complexity is good. For many, it’s the old adage of killing two birds with one stone. Small and emerging business owners look to introduce more automation so they can scale and grow without adding heads, and they'd like to do it without substantial additional investment in IT.


This is a formidable challenge and requires small and emerging business owners to develop and use some different muscles and approaches when considering their IT needs. We can help make the simple less complex and more scalable. I’ll be talking more about how in the next several posts.


Thanks for reading.


Dave Rice, TrueCloud CEO


http://www.truecloud.com.