I recently read a great article over at bMighty.com entitled 10 Ways to Leverage Information Technology. This article, aimed at small and medium sized companies provides some great insight. It outlines some key ways for companies to maximize their IT spending to reduce risk and enhance productivity.
One of the keys they list is Find Great Staff. This is the greatest thing you can ever do for your business. In addition to finding intelligent, dedicated staff you need to take care of them. They also totally hit it on the head when they advise treating your IT staff like kings, by providing them great pay, acknowledgment, self management, responsibility, and flexible schedule, and professional growth.
I have worked at many companies that do some of these things, none of these things, and some that try, but don’t do any of it well. Depending on the organization and the resources that the organization has available to them, you may be able to skimp on some of these items, but be careful. If you cut back on them to much you will likely end up with a miserable, undedicated staff that will not be in it for the long haul.
I would also add a couple more items to the list of things to provide your IT staff, funding and capacity. What I mean by funding is ensure that your IT staff has the proper budget to perform their jobs and work on the projects assigned to them. Far too often companies, especially smaller ones, have lofty goals and expectations for their IT resources, but they do not want to pay for them, or forget to. When this happens your IT staff will find themselves begging for resources, missing deadlines, and in the end being less productive, which will ultimately result in a loss of productivity for non-IT staff.
The second item I would add is capacity. This means do expect your IT staff to ever be at 100% capacity unless there is an IT emergency. This is important because if you staff your people at 100% all of the time when there is an emergency all of your planned projects will slip. This can have ripple effects across the organization.
The rest of the article outlines some other great points which I will probably touch on over the upcoming weeks.
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