So you’ve worked your way up from techie to IT manager through diligent hard work, technical capability and a constant drive to expand your skill set. You can troubleshoot and resolve mission-critical servers in a heartbeat, manage complex IT deployments, and ensure the security of your company’s valuable digital IP.
Yet you’re still “The IT Guy” who can fix the printer when it refuses to communicate, quickly connect the latest Android tablet to your ultra-secure corporate network, or fix the CEOs assistant’s email when he or she forgets their password. Even when you’re in the middle of rolling out the latest Exchange server updates to the production environment or making sure that the latest version of WordPress has been updated and all errors on the company’s website are resolved.
Which, by the way, you’ve achieved on a budget more suited to a hosted email solution without any of the enterprise-grade perks of a proper Exchange implementation and with limited man-power.
The business-IT divide
The trouble is, that your organisation on the whole but particularly the decision-makers on the board, fail to recognise the critical nature of IT and allocate budget accordingly. The fact of the matter is, these board members don’t think strategically about IT within the business. It’s treated as a grudge expense, something which has to be maintained but doesn’t actually deliver any real value to the organisation.
This approach is common among business leaders who don’t speak “tech”. IT and business speak very different languages, which is the root of a problem which has become known as the business-IT divide. Because of this language barrier, business struggles to comprehend the real value of IT in the same way that IT often struggles to get to grips with the vagaries of “doing business”.
It is for this reason the business tends to view the return on IT investments as constantly decreasing, which in turn results in a limited IT budget. The inability to communicate efficiently across this chasm of perception means that there is little room to move with the IT budget, sometimes even compromising critical services, but it’s still your job to keep these services running and updated.
It’s enough to make you scan the recruitment specialists for possible job openings elsewhere. Surely not all SMEs face this challenge every day? There must be a workplace which isn’t a large multinational, yet has recognised the strategic nature of their IT and provides the budget and resources necessary to support leveraging this platform for future business growth.
The reality is, that few companies of this size do. Don’t despair though, there is a solution which you could get started working towards today!
Closing the gap
To overcome this barrier requires more than a dedicated IT Manager attempting to translate it’s value to the board. It requires the repositioning of IT as a strategic resource.
By adopting a strategic approach, decision-makers in your SME are more likely to recognise the value of IT to the business, and will ultimately allocate budget accordingly. This could mean additional staff to free up your time for more critical duties, the funds to ensure that your equipment is up to date, and recognition from management for the potential for IT.
Either way, this realignment and the closing of the business-IT divide will result in your work being attributed with the business value it deserves. More importantly, it should elevate the IT department from being perceived as a funding black hole to a strategic critical business resource worth the allocation of at the very least sufficient budget to operate effectively.
These results won’t come overnight of course. But the sooner you start guiding your SME down this road, the sooner your IT efforts will be an integral component of the future of the business.
To start the task of narrowing, and ultimately closing the business-IT divide in your organisation, I invite you to embark on a “Relevant IT” journey. The journey begins by assessing the current status of the six critical strategies that are needed to close this business-IT divide. You can make use of this consulting tool of ours yourself, at no cost: www.relevantit.co.za. Use it to help discover your next steps in closing this divide in your SME.
