If you look at what is invested in the process of employing a new staff member, culture fit between the person and the organisation is essential. In any relationship between two or more people all parties must display adaptability, and a certain level of compromise. At the same time, there must be a great degree of natural fit on both sides - a cultural synergy. Rick Parry, MD of Progress Software South Africa, believes the same applies to software purchases.
If you are bringing a new person into the workplace, chances are you already have an infrastructure and a team in place. The critical reason for bringing someone in is to enhance your business processes in some way - to add to whatever it is you are already achieving. It would be of no value to your organisation to bring in someone who does not complement the team and add value to your business.
It is likely that you will look at the medium- to long-term investment when you bring someone new into your organisation. It is unlikely that the return on investment will be immediate, but that person should have a role to play in the medium- to long-term strategy for your business.
All these considerations can be equally applied to your selection of a software application for your business. Whatever application you choose, it must be most suited to your business and to your current business requirements, but it must be adaptable, flexible, and agile enough to fit in with the specifications of business today and with your future plans. It must be integratable and complement the rest of your operations - it must be a team member. Like a newly employed staff member, your new application is unlikely to yield short-term benefits, but you should be fairly certain of the long-term ones as your business moves forward.
Like every decision you make for your business, the purchase of business applications should be decided on in the greater context of your business as a whole.
The larger the operation, the more difficult this becomes, as there is more bureaucracy that separates business units and people from the purpose of the business itself. People become numbers, and pockets of them focus exclusively on their own areas of operation.
The evolution of IT has shown us that in the past people just bought technology because it was there, with little thought as to why, or what it can do for their business. This is still happening to some extent today, but companies are increasingly recognising that it is not a smart thing to do, and they are looking at their investment in IT in terms of service delivery to the business. They are starting to take the same approach to IT that HR practitioners have to people: keep the position open until you find the right person.
One of the reasons for the slow development of this realisation is the fact that most IT people know very little about business. Up until recently the position of CIO was rarely found in SA, and there are still very few CIOs or IT directors who sit on company boards. There is not sufficient appreciation within corporate SA of the dependence that every organisation has today on its IT.
This is exacerbated by the fact that the IT industry has had an abysmal delivery record. Organisations have spent vast sums of money and very few have had any form of real, demonstrable ROI.
But that is beginning to change: on the one hand business cannot afford pointless IT spend anymore; on the other, Y2K and the dot-bomb explosion in many ways showed the industry up for what it was. Y2K must be the biggest con trick pulled off by any industry in the last century, and the corporate world realised that rather quickly, a fact which left a nasty taste in everyone`s mouth.
But while people may no longer trust IT, they remain dependent on it. Think about how long your business would survive if your IT infrastructure went down. How long would it take before you sent your workforce home? The realisation of the vital element that IT is beginning to play has led to a drive for added value and increased ROI.
The right IT decisions can lead to a reduction in staffing costs and, in developing countries, the number of people who are laid off as a result of this can actually be absorbed into new job opportunities that arise as evolving economies start to hone their business practices.
In SA, we are striving for increased efficiencies and smaller workforces. This is a Utopian ideal and the reality is that the availability of resources in this country does not allow us to be as selective and as idealistic as we`d like to be. However, I believe we should resist the temptation to employ people just for the sake of employing them until we can show a demonstrable ROI. The same principles apply to IT purchases.
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