Making the right decisions when spending on tech

 

Information technology solutions and options are proliferating faster than rabbits. With all these choices and options, how can you make the right decision for your business? Ultimately, there are three main criteria that a savvy buyer should address: speed, flexibility and economics.

• Speed: All too often, people pursue optimization. In principle, optimizing is a worthy goal. However, in today's fast-paced dynamic business environment, this is somewhat impractical. Why? By the time all the information and data points have been analyzed, crunched and validated, something has changed.

A more effective approach is to identify the best solution, commit and go. The sooner the solution is in place, the sooner the business reaps the benefits, whether it's increased sales, reduced costs or both. A 95 percent solution that takes a year to implement is typically not as valuable to an enterprise as an 85 percent solution that can be implemented in 30 days.

• Flexibility: There are really two components to this. One is from a business perspective and the other is from a technology perspective. Businesses that survive and thrive continue to evolve. There's no sense choosing a technology solution that only supports today's processes.
• Economics: Please note this is different than price. Price is certainly a component, but the difference is significant. When making a technology investment, it's important to capture all the costs, procurement, implementation, disposal, cost of change, and productivity improvements.

Technology is a tool for a business. Therefore, an ROI analysis should be conducted. If the investment does not bring dollars to the bottom line, why do it unless it is a safety or compliance issue?

Make sure that you are utilizing hard dollars as opposed to soft-dollar savings. The harder people work to cost-justify and rationalize the investment, the higher the probability that it is a bad investment. The best IT buying decisions stand on their own financial merit.

Colin Braithwaite is managing partner at Dalco in Nashville. www.dalcoinc.com, 615-308-6960