Finding The Essentials
You most likely know what your essential information is. It’s the information that tells you if you are reaching your goals. It also is the information that and processes that free up your people to do better work, create new ideas and innovate. For example, essential information for you may be having to only look in one place to find a customer’s email address and their sales history. Of course it will also be information like time to ship, sales per employee, speed through the bottleneck, order backlog, time from Sales Order to Cash, or plain old Gross Margin.
Essential Systems
Simply put, it's your systems which get you the essentials, not faster computers. And if the systems you paid for are not getting you the essentials, then your return on investment is slow or nonexistent. Here’s what we mean. When you invested in your systems – most likely you were made your decisions based on this chart – you made sure the new systems were going to get you your essentials, or at least that’s what was promised.
However, what you have most likely experienced, is the below chart. Most of your entire IT budget is exhausted just getting the basics up and running. And even today it consumes most (if not all) of your ongoing IT budget. Sadly, most likely it is your non-IT staff who still have to do the work to get your essentials.
