This is 5-point-plan number 2.

Business Productivity Improvement in 2009 – another 5 Point Plan

What can you do to improve the productivity of your business? Here’s a simple checklist to consider, starting by looking at whether you should you do IT Differently?

Do your IT systems meet your business needs? Are they lagging behind competitors? Is it essential that you reduce IT opex and capex? All of the above? Now more than ever business requires adaptable IT supply that meets changing needs at a lower and more flexible cost structure. Three approaches should be explored for strategic gains...

1. Software as a Service (SaaS)

SaaS, Hosted Applications or “Cloud Computing”. Get past the hype and you’ll now find mature options for business. The concept is essentially where a supplier operates and maintains an application that you (and other users) can access and use securely via the internet.

Benefits generally include paying for what you use (fundamentally, a zero capex variable opex model), access from anywhere including mobile devices and knowing that someone else will keep the application maintained and up to date (and the infrastructure to host that application to boot).

Check out NZs Xero for your finance system, SalesForce.com for Client Relationship Management and Microsoft’s bundle of Cloud Computing products.

2. Open Source Software

In a nutshell software that is free to use. Open Source now has a huge following worldwide and the explicit endorsement of many governments and major corporates (both as suppliers of Open Source software and as users of it). From the largest of business applications to the smallest software utility it’s likely that there will be an Open Source option. Unlike Hosted Applications you still need the environment to run them and expertise to support them, but many organisations specialise in this. Visit the New Zealand Open Source Society http://nzoss.org.nz/.

3. Outsourcing

There’s a reason why the even the big players choose to outsource a large chunk of their IT expenditure when on the face of it they have sufficient requirements to justify a large IT department – there are gains through specialisation that can be shared. This helps with productivity. Whether you pursue (i) or (ii) above, or not, you will have an in-house IT environment of some form and you should evaluate whether you are the best organisation to support and maintain it.

And two points for quick wins...

4. Mobile

Does your company use Telecom and Vodafone mobiles in your fleet? Many firms do to meet specific international roaming or coverage requirements. The problem is interconnection charges between the two networks will be inflating your bill every month as your staff members talk to each other “off-net”.

With both operators working on improving roaming and domestic coverage, the time is right to single source from one provider.

5. Data

Data can be one of the most significant costs for an organisation, particularly if your business operates across more than one site and requires reliable connectivity between them. Optimising the service you are purchasing for the real quality of service you require can generate savings as well as improvements in the performance of your data network.

For example if you run a retail business operating from several sites and servicing trade customers, reliable store inventory information could be the difference between winning or losing a sale. From a data perspective you require high availability (to give the customer and immediate answer) but low bandwidth connectivity. What are you paying for at the moment? Possibly high bandwidth high availability managed data connectivity which exceeds your real needs.

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