When business operations gets agile and adopts new strategy or tactics, IT should be agile too and embrace the ever changing business needs. Converse to this, today we see a lot of cases where IT pushes back on business needs and calls business needs being unreasonable with their demands. There are a lot cases where business wants to introduce a new product into the market in 3-4 weeks and IT comes back with the answer that it would take a 6-7 months for modifying the IT systems towards supporting the new product. As a result business is not satisfied with IT’s contributions and business tends to develop silo IT systems in Excel, Access databases etc.

To avoid this tussle IT function should be agile and realize the reasons why it exists as a seprate function in the organization or enjoys a prominence in an Oraganization. Primary reason for IT’s existence is its capability to provide solutions to business problems in a highly productive fashion. IT function should treat the business functions as their internal customers and adopt the principle of `customer is always right’.

Collaborating with business:

For IT to be agile, business functions first needs to involve IT in the very early stages of business strategy or tactical discussions. Business functions should give due attention to the CIO’s inputs on strategy. Over a long period of time, a large number of people in IT have understood the nitty gritties of business while solving the IT issues on a day-to-day basis. A good example for this case is the IT expert who supports the month-end financial close process would have equivalent knowledge as that of the financial manager responsible for the month-end close process. Today IT functions have imbibed Business-IT boundary spanners within their groups, and business should leverage their knowledge during the strategy definition phase. This would be advantageous to the business from multiple perspectives.

First to support the new business process, IT could leverage the existing IT or Knowledge assets within the Organization. Second IT could throughly evaluate the additional hardware / software resources which needs to be procured in a cost effective way. Third, this gives ample time for IT to alter their tactics to meet business team expectations.

Organizing for Agility:

One of the key questions that business teams often ask IT is, what is the time-to-market for an IT solution to a given business problem. IT can help business and it self by setting the right expectations on its ability to deliver the solutions right from the strategy discussions.

IT can work hand-in-hand with the business team by:
Rationalizing the infrastructure and application portfolio’s from time-to-time and identifying the appropriate internal asset or a vendors product for delivering the right solution on time.

IT should lay strong emphasis on enterprise architecture that would promote the scalability of hardware, system and application software.

IT should be constantly evaluating the technology changes and identify those tools that would be applicable for their business, so that IT has a solution even before business asks IT for solving a critical business problem.

For getting a quick ROI, IT should constantly evaluate latest tools (methods) like SOA, SaaS, cloud computing, to readily choose a method for the purpose.

IT should identify and establish relationships with IT services providers who posses the capability to solve businesses typical problems. This is required as its not only important that internal IT staff is geared up for solving business issues, but IT partners should also be kept on the tenter hooks to deliever the solution to the business on time.

In order to keep its prominence in the organization IT should constinuously strive for agility to provide a competetive advantage to the business.

In the last decade or so, many organizations have seen reasonable success in implementing an ERP system. It may be time to assess your success and critically look how better organizations can reap the full benefits from the ERP system.

ERP Maximization refers to utilizing the full potential of ERP system that an Organization owns.  The following are some of the way’s you can achieve maximization of your ERP system.

Derive value form ERP License: It starts with examining the licenses you have brought from the vendor. How many modules of system are you currently using, how many modules you are not using, do you foresee a need to use the modules that are not used today would used in the future for the benefit of the business, can you renegotiate your licensing contract’s with your vendor based on the changes in market factors, vendor pricing models, and your organization needs.

Analyze your maintenance and support contract, in terms of do you really need the level of support you bought, how many times in the past have you requested help from your vendor? Renegotiate your support contract that suits your needs from time to time.

Increase utilization of currently installed modules: When you had designed and implemented the system for the first time, you probably had implemented the system to meet 80 %-90% of business requirements. Hence you probably would have used about 50 % -60% of the features available in the ERP system. It may be time to educate the users, on the advanced features of the system, which would improve productivity of the users. Enhance the system configuration, to fulfill the user’s enhancement requests!

Increase the application footprint: If you have licensed several modules, but have not implemented some of them, then you should consider how you can leverage these unused modules to fulfill the business needs. Retiring a costly a legacy system and migrating it into the ERP system could fetch you rich dividends. At the same time look at, which other functions of the business can utilize the ERP system, and how your business could get benefitted by extending the application footprint.

Increase the usage: You can maximize the returns by utilizing the maximum count of the user group allowed by your ERP license, and by increasing the no. of modules used by an individual user.

Utilize any professional services offered by the vendor as part of the license: Vendors usually cover some diagnostic checks on their apps from time to time as a part of their license. Inviting your vendor to perform these diagnostic check’s helps you gaining insights on how you are utilizing your system.

It’s basically the more you run the apps, the better are the returns on your investments. Of  course all the above has to be aligned to your organizations Business & IT strategy.

In Organizations where enteprise systems (ERP, CRM, HRMS, Business Intelligence) have been the nerve center of the information flow, tapping these systems in a different way could provide new outlook of your business. The many areas that Enterprise IT can contribute for the beefit of the organizations are in

Customer Insights: Looking at your Customer BI dashboards in a diffrent way could provide insight on from whcih specific customer segment is the current demand from and which customer segment is not buying from us. In economic cycles like these, it is easy for the managers to assume that the reasons for customers exit is due to weakened demand or othere issues related to themselves. However if you re-orgnize your BI dashboard, may be the you would analyse that customer exits are due to some of your internal issues like Customer Service.

Supplier Relations: Dissecting the Supply chain analytics and processes  can lead us to understand the suppliers who are willing to live with our organization during the difficult times and who can supply to us on better business terms.

HRMS : Majority of the employees in an organization could have multiple skills. Having a deep understanding of the primary and secondary skills of the employeess can aid restructuring efforts of organization. This could also be used for reataining the employees with right and attitude and ability to bring their scondary skills to the forefront for the benefit of the organization. 

Financials: Organizations who have cash reserves and can conserve cash are the once who would be able to turn around the corner soon along with the economy. Identifying new revenue streams, and efficiently booking and collecting cash through financial system could be a great benefit for the organization.

Role of IT: In times like these IT can play a proactive role to provide new insights to the business. When there is not adequate capital to implement and design large programs, IT could play a meaningful role to tie the broken pieces of integrated system cost effectively.

IT folks who work at Enterprises which have modern BI systems, can easily mine the dataware houses easily and provide valuable information to the business. IT folks having spent a lot time with the nerves of this information system  are also the folks suited for identifying the broken processes and fixing them in a meaningful, which would again provide integrated information to the top management.

IT team can provide new insights on the business, using cost effective methods by maximizing and optimizing enterprise application footprint, integrating systems with low cost tools and creating a desktop environment which would aid decision making capability in front of the end users.

At the end of the day, its the business acumen of the executives on macro, micro economic factors of business cycles coupled with Oraganizational strategy is what would determine the success of a turn around strategy. But there is a lot of scope on how Enterprise IT can creatively aid in this turn around.