Newsletter February 2007

Opening the IT Black Box, Part 1

Over the course of publishing this newsletter, we've touched on many topics, from security to analysis to reporting. In the next few issues, we're going to focus on how we help clients on a day-to-day basis and why we are generally called in.

Lucky for us, many people are unhappy with the technology that runs their business. This unhappiness manifests itself in many ways-they can't serve their customers properly, they can't get the information they need, or maybe they just can't sleep at night because they have no certainty that anyone really knows how their systems work.

When we are called in, we often find that our clients don't quite know where to start. They know they're unhappy with their technology, but they don't know how to fix it. Maybe they think that they need new software or that their staff is simply incompetent. Our goal is to give businesspeople a way to think about their problems before we suggest major changes or investments. We find that even to some of the smartest executives, IT is a black box. They may have a tremendous grasp of operations, product development or sales, and over the years, they've probably picked up the basics of finance and accounting. But when it comes to IT, they just don't have the same kind of confidence.

In our next few issues, we're going to try to give you the tools to open the black box, so you can feel confident when managing your IT investment. Based on our experience, IT problems fall into the following six categories:

1. People problems
2. Process problems
3. Transactional problems
4. Reporting problems
5. Vendor problems
6. Risk problems

In the interest of keeping this newsletter short, we won't go into detail right now about how we solve people problems. But we do want to point out that this is the FIRST area we look at when we start working with a company. By people problems we don't mean technical incompetence but rather lack of communication and bad management. Too often, IT doesn't focus on management priorities, and conversely, management has no idea what IT needs in order to be successful.

Let's end with a couple of questions: If someone asked you what your finance or sales department was working on, you could give a good answer, couldn't you? If someone asked you what your IT department was working on, what would that answer be like?

Red Three helps companies and organizations select, implement and customize the software they need to run their businesses. We focus on projects that are critical to key aspects of your organization-financials, human resources, supply chain, procurement, and sales force automation.

Contact us at info@redthreeconsulting.com

Red Three Consulting: Transforming Information Technology into Answer Technology