Align IT Investments With Organization Goals

While some organisation leaders loathe spending on IT, a growing number are already convinced of the necessity of investing in it. Unfortunately, a substantial fraction of those convinced to pursue IT investments are misguided as to which initiatives are really contributory to reaching their organisation’s goals.

In the end, many of their purchases either end up underutilised or become white elephants altogether. There are also those difficult to spot – IT purchases that do become integrated into daily operations but have little effect on the organisation’s growth, positioning, profitability, or efficiency.

If a purchase is to cost your company a fortune, then its positive impact on established company objectives should reflect accordingly. But how would you know it would? You can’t hope to foresee all its benefits especially if the IT solution is still quite new to you.

Our job is not only to identify the strengths of an IT system but also to determine whether these strengths are at all useful to your organisation’s thrusts.

Basically, here’s what we’ll do:

  • Conduct a rigorous analysis of your organisation to determine the specific and overall impact of certain IT solutions. We’ll be looking for areas where the effects of IT can result in the most rapid reduction of costs and, at the same time, drive the organisation in the direction of its established goals.
  • Propose cohesive best-of-breed solutions in line with the results of our analysis. Our familiarity with the IT landscape and our extensive selection of contacts in the industry will allow us to conduct insightful picks from a vast field of choices.
  • Establish best practices to make sure IT investments are optimally utilised.
  • Perform periodic reviews to ensure practices and processes are still in line with the established goals.

Find out how we can increase your efficiency even more:

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Top 3 reasons to get into Multi-Channel Retail

Multi-channel retail, which nowadays understandably includes online channels, is something you just have to do this year. Every single day you put off doing it, the competition gobbles up market share that should have been yours. There are a number of reasons why even successful retailers are now going into multi-channel retailing. Here?s three of the most important ones.

1. You’ll get a BIG jump in sales

Not counting this year, which could be getting a big boost from major activities like the Queen?s Diamond Jubilee and the 2012 Olympics, sales of UK retailers have been experiencing tremendous growth particularly from their online channels. Already two years ago (2010), a number of UK retailers boasted significant increases in sales as a result of multi-channel retail initiatives. These retailers included:

  • Argos, which got a whopping ?1.9bn from multichannel sales back then;
  • House of Fraser, which reported a 150% jump in its online sales in just 6 months; and
  • Debenhams, whose profits rose by 20%

There were many others. Now, the reason I?m showing you 2010 figures is because online retail sales increased by 14% in 2011 and those same businesses still added to that growth. So, if only you had enough foresight and started expanding your business to the Web two years ago, you could just imagine what your sales would have been today.

The good news is that, it’s not yet too late if you start now. Here?s why…

2. Those numbers are going to keep on growing

We’re getting all sorts of predictions from leading researchers regarding the possible growth of the Internet economy. All these predictions have one thing in common. They all have a positive outlook. The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), for instance, predicts an average growth of no less than 10% per year in the G-20 nations.

3. Most online retailers aren’t doing it right yet

Although many retailers have already started bringing their business to the Web, most of them are doing it the wrong way. For example, many of them fail to integrate their offline and online channels. This is a serious shortcoming because it leads to customer dissatisfaction.

When a customer goes to your website and sees something he likes, you wouldn’t want him to drive all the way to your store only to find out that the item isn’t available there or, if the item is there, that it isn’t priced as he expected. The lack of multi-channel integration is very common among multi-channel retailers.

These inadequacies are actually good news because it means there are still many areas you can improve on. After improving on them, you can then highlight those areas as your key differentiators.

If you’re still looking for more reasons on why you should go into multi-channel retailing, read this post:

“5 Numbers Showing Why the Time to Invest on eCommerce in the UK is Now”

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How Small Irish Businesses Avoid the GDPR Sting

Accountants providing chartered accounting services and tax advice are alerting smaller Irish companies to the consequences of the pending General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). They believe these are going to feel the most pain come 25 May 2018, if they do not implement GDPR by then. We are trying our best to help avoid this situation by providing advice.

How to Kick the GDPR Ball into Play

The Irish Information Commissioner?s Office has produced a toolkit regarding where?s best to start. They suggest beginning with an information security assessment to determine the gaps companies need to close. Once quantified, this leads naturally to a plan of action, and resources needed to fulfil it. Here?s how to go about it:

1. Start by assessing your current ability to identify, assess, and manage threats to customer data security. Have you done anything at all to date? You must be holding some customer information surely, and it is highly likely the GDPR applies to you.

2. Next, review your company?s current customer data security policies. Are they documented and approved, or do new employees discover them sitting next to Nellie? Rate yourself on a scale where ten is successful implementation.

3. Now consider how well you have pinned responsibilities on individuals to implement policies and take the lead on GDPR. The latter should be the business owner, or a board member with clout to make things happen.

4. By now, you should have a grasp of the scale of work ahead of you, remembering the EU deadline is 25 May 2018. If this sounds overwhelming, consider outsourcing to your accountant or a specialist provider.

5. Under the General Data Protection Regulation you have only 72 hours to report a breach of customer data security to the Information Commissioner?s Office. Do you have a quality assurance mechanism to oversee this?

Tangible Things to Bring Your Own People on Board

With all the changes going on, there is a risk of your employees regarding GDPR as ?another management idea going nowhere.? Thus, it is important to incorporate the new EU regulations in staff training, particularly with regard to data security generally. They may fully come on board only once they see tangible signs of progress. You should in any case put the following measures in place unless you already have them:

1. A secure area for your servers and for any paperwork your customers provided. This implies access control on a need-to-know basis to protect the information against loss, damage, and theft.

2. A protocol for storage media and record disposal when you no longer require them or something supersedes them. You are the custodian of other people?s information and they deserve nothing less.

3. Procedures to secure customer data on employee mobile devices and computers: This must extend to work done at home, at consultant sites, and by remote workers.

4. Secure configuration of all existing and new hardware to minimise vulnerability and storage media crashes. These quality assurance measures should extend to removable media and remote backups.

So Is This the Worst of the Pain?

We are at the heart of the matter, although there is more to tell in future articles. You may be almost there, if you already protect your proprietary information. If not, you may have key company information already open to malware.We should welcome the EU General Data Protection Regulation as a notice that it is time to face up to the challenges of data protection and security generally. The age of hacking and malware is upon us. The offender could be a disgruntled employee, or your competition just down the street. It is time to take precautions.

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Risk Assessment

Risk assessment is a vital component in BC (Business Continuity) planning. Through risk assessment, your company may determine what vulnerabilities your assets possess. Not only that, you’ll also be able to quantify the loss of value of each asset against a specific threat. That way, you can rank them so that assets that are most likely to cripple your business when say a specific disaster strikes can be given top priority.

However, a poorly implemented risk assessment may also cost you unnecessary expenditures. Many risk assessors are too enthusiastic in pointing out risks that, at the end of the assessment, they tend to over-appraise even those having practically zero probability of ever occurring.

We can assure you of a realistic assessment of your assets’ risks and propose cost-effective countermeasures. These are the things we can do:

  • Identify your unsafe practices and propose the best alternatives.
  • Perform qualitative risk assessment if you want fast results and lesser interruptions on your operations.
  • Perform quantitative risk assessment if you want the most accurate depiction of your risks and the corresponding justifiable costs of each.
  • Conduct frequency and consequence analysis to identify unforeseen harmful events and determine their effects to various components of your organisation and its surroundings.

We can also assist you with the following:

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