Getting under the Hood with your IT

If your car was behaving mysteriously, you'd take it to a mechanic. If you had a toothache, you'd pay your dentist a visit. And if you had some sort of a physical ailment, you'd probably schedule a doctor’s appointment.


Similarly, finding an expert to help you address your IT needs can save you a lot of unwanted grief and sleepless nights. We can help you assess your current IT capability through the use of our proven methodology.


Let me tell you about one of our client engagements. They were on the verge of investing a significant amount of money in extending their IT software capability when we told them to wait! We asked them questions in 3 categories:


1) Do you know how much you've invested in your IT capability to date? Do you know what the return on that investment is? Can you show us how you measure that?


IT spend can be treacherous, especially in small or expanding businesses where dedicated staff with oversight responsibility is scarce. Understanding the total cost of your IT capability and it's value to the firm should be formally assessed before considering the next round of significant investment. The accumulated spend on IT that our client had experienced over the past several years was a surprising discovery to them to say the least.


2) What are the two or three pain points that necessitate the need to invest in IT? Have they been thoroughly investigated to identify the root causes? What alternatives were considered?


Unfortunately a large number of planned upgrades go awry simply because the problem was not properly understood in the first place. An IT assessment provides you with the assurance that the problems have been identified apart and separate from the solutions intended to address them. Invariably this provides the freedom to consider a broader range of alternative solutions as well. Our assessment revealed several different risk areas in need of improvement that our client wasn't completely aware of.


3) What standards and processes are in place in IT to provide proper safeguards for the business?


Whenever changes are made in IT, existing support practices are invariably impacted. Small or emerging businesses are highly susceptible to fallout in this area primarily due to the lack of a dedicated IT staff. An IT assessment identifies the critical controls that should be in place before and after a planned set of changes are made to IT. Our client was relieved to know that the controls his business was accustomed to would remain intact.


IT assessment costs are quite reasonable. Your IT assessment should be performed as a stand-alone exercise with no strings attached such as an upfront guarantee to implement the improvements discovered as a result of the assessment findings.


Your IT assessment will establish the “as is” condition of your current environment including software applications, hardware infrastructure, the people required to keep it running, whether internal or external and the standards and processes that are in place.


Make sure you include your employees. Let them know about this in advance. Tell them why you’re doing it and what help you’ll need from them. It’s important that they understand that the decision to perform this assessment is not a reflection of their work, but rather a necessary step to improve your overall IT capability.


Expect the entire process along with a formal response and a review of the results to be completed within 30 days. The response should be in layman’s terms and should articulate areas of opportunity along with the associated cost and risk, ranked in order of the most to the least important discovery.


In the next segment I'll discuss how an assessment can help to form the basis for an IT Strategy.


Thanks for reading.


Dave Rice, TrueCloud CEO


http://www.truecloud.com.