Roadmap to successful IT Initiative

Information Technology (IT) can be implemented to provide critical information, increase productivity, overcome failure and gain a competitive edge. However, despite a high degree of IT usage by businesses, the business managers fail to adopt IT as effectively as the larger businesses do and, therefore, fail to exploit the benefits to the extent that they should. The reasons for this include:

• An inability to analyze processes and/or systems that make a business work
• A lack of a general knowledge of IT
• A lack of expertise to computerize the business processes
• There is the sub-optimal use of IT through the non-identification of the information needs of the business, resulting in the mismatching thereof to IT requirements
• Finally, a lack of a formal, affordable means to assist in the decision-making process as to what IT to use where, when and how within the business environment.

Often, an organization will have a business problem that it moves to solve with a specific technical solution. They then install new software without considering whether the solution is an apt one and without knowing what it will take to make the technology work. Organizations are recognizing the need for guidance on connections between business problems, value propositions, technology solutions, and their implementation.  Eris provides organizations with the necessary guidance to enable an efficient and effective change effort.

Many great initiatives never reach their full potential. The initiatives fail to meet their stakeholder expectations, return on investment targets, and more importantly, the expectations for customer impact. Common pitfalls include:

• Flawed design of strategies
• Inadequate risk management and mitigation plans
• Competing or misaligned initiatives
• Inability to facilitate and manage the project

Four phases of IT Initiative:

Eris helps you document business blueprint, rfi, rfp, sample data and demo script documents for your IT Initiative related to ERP, POS, CRM, CMS, DMS and Business Intelligence.

1. Initiating:

It is important to do requirement analysis and make a business case for IT initiative. Clients can expect real values in our ability to pinpoint the ideal breadth and depth of the overall project, with the goal of achieving the best ROI and meeting the strategic business goals. Eris helps you identify and document your requirements and do ROI analysis for the IT initiative.

2. Buying:

Eris educates vendor about your specific needs so as to enable them to customize demonstrations for your business questions. It oversees construction of a prototype, if required evaluate and score RFP responses and demos. Recommend the vendor and software that best meet your functional, budget and timeframe requirements. With Eris’s negotiation guidance, you can be sure of only buying the seats and modules that you need, at the best available terms. Eris will:

• Review and clarify your requirements to enable a razor-sharp view of your unique needs, usually starting with Business Blueprint
• Work with your team and, if needed, create an RFP that asks the right questions at the appropriate level of detail
• Develop sample data and demo script to avoid marketing demonstrations
• Develop your short list of two to three vendors that closely match your requirements

3. Implementing:

In our experience, IT initiatives typically require the implementation of multiple applications such as ERP, POS, CRM, Document Management, Portals and dashboard development. These applications often overlap. A range of IT sub-projects are involved, from database and technology infrastructure setup, to source data cleansing and loading, and finally performance tuning. There are often multiple products/modules from one or more vendors to learn about, implement, and integrate. External implementation experts-vendor or other third-party-may also need to be integrated into the team. All these activities and personnel need to be coordinated in advance with a unified framework, while adhering to a tight schedule and budget, and keeping up communications with your stakeholders.

With the investment required for IT Initiatives, mistakes can be costly and company exposure can be significant. It makes good business sense to tap into outside expertise, thereby reducing risks considerably. We bring considerable experience and skill to the task of ensuring that an enterprise-wide, organizationally – deep IT Initiatives achieve rapid user acceptance and adheres to the original strategic intent and need.

A valuable layer of overall management and guidance is added to your project by Eris’s professionals. Specifically, they apply their:

• Unbiased third-party perspective, independent of vendors, line managers and the IT department
• Experience in communicating with all stakeholders and resolving business, territorial, and technical issues
• Experience from the client, service provider and technology vendor perspectives
• Knowledge gained from focusing day-in, day-out on deployment of IT Solutions

4. Running:

Eris will work with your leadership to guide the project successfully from start to finish-and provide feedback along the way. To begin, an overall project plan brings together all the necessary pieces. Our experts architect the functional solution to meet your business requirements, and then oversee all subprojects and coordination. With weekly deliverables, ongoing status reports to your stakeholders, our objective third-party stance to help referee conflicting needs or agendas, Eris helps you deliver the successful IT initiative solution on time and within budget.

To compete effectively in today’s marketplace, you must review your application environment over time and identify where to perform process changes to help you improve your current business operations. Working with a team of experts with the deep, technical skills required to help you maximize the value of your software solution can be an important first step toward becoming an on demand business. Our consultants provide the guidance you need to avoid common pitfalls-minimizing your risk and maximizing your investment in both people and technology. Eris helps you upgrade smoothly to the new version of ERP, Database or even the operating system.