The Importance of Selling IT to YOUR Company
As IT individuals, we all understand the importance of having the right IT tools in place to help our organizations. “Streamlining Business Practices”, “Going to the Cloud”, “Having Disaster Recovery in Place”; these are all meaningful IT terms that are not always understood by business executives who, most of the time, make the final decision on various IT projects. To help sell your internal IT initiatives, please take a look at some factors below that would help out with that challenge that is faced by IT internally.
1. Understand your business
a. Large organizations have different IT needs and initiatives than smaller or mid-sized organizations. If, as an IT individual, you are coming to work for a smaller company then your previous employer, you may want to look at how IT is handled at your current place of employment. Understanding that the latest and greatest IT “toys” might not be able to fit the budget your company has, is important when trying to push newer technologies. Perhaps using a phased approach might help your boss approve that new communications tool or networking refresh you so desire.
2. Company Culture
a. Realizing how your company operates is very important when looking at newer technologies. If you have a younger work force that has grown up with technology all around them, you may take a more aggressive approach to what you would like implemented within your organization. If you have an older work force, who does not embrace technology the way a 20 something year old would do, perhaps you help them out and provide simpler tools to start with and then move them up to a more advanced tool set. Truly understanding how your workforce operates is the secret to help push your projects forward.
3. Using IT as the differentiator to your competition
a. In today’s society, everyone is looking for the better, faster and more customer service friendly tools to help sell whatever your organization may do. Try to put yourself in your customers’ shoes once in a while to see if you are doing as much as you can to not only retain them but also provide added value so that they can tell their friends to use your product or service. Think, when my customer calls in, do they get a live person on the phone or do they have to press “1” then “2” then “3” and finally get to a live person? Do your customers have access of getting a hold of an individual in various forms or not? See what your competition is doing and then try and replicate or do more than them. With the speed of service that is demanded by consumers in today’s world, you must always ask “I am doing enough to keep them happy?” because if the answer is “no” most likely your competition is.
Arash Zadeh, PEI
While the search for technology trends currently affecting organizations worldwide continues, some audit professionals believe it’s better to take a different approach. Rather than trying to identify the technologies that will impact organizations the most, auditors should concentrate on the technologies they should keep in mind as they plan their annual work based on the organization’s latest risk assessment. These technologies include currently used security applications, tools that facilitate audit work, and the applications that were least examined during previous audit cycles.
One particularly creative application pairs new technologies with service learning, in which students perform an authentic service for community organizations. At a college in Hawai‘i, ESL students work in small groups to make a Web site on behalf of a community organization (see discussion in Warschauer, 1999). They interview members of the organization, gather information and documents from them, and put everything together in a coherent online package, learning both writing and presentation skills in the process.