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The Growing Importance of IT Strategy for Small Businesses

Abhinav Anand | March 11, 2022 | 619 views

The Growing Importance of IT Strategy for Small Businesses

The Growing Importance of IT Strategy for Small Businesses

Strategizing for your business’s growth is always a core element for any organization. With constant evolution in IT, the components that can help you grow are exponential. Understanding how and what to do is necessary to plan an effective growth strategy. This is even more important for small businesses looking to make significant strides in the industry. Small businesses, on the other hand, need to be even more careful about how they use technology and think like big businesses in their field.

As per a report on SoutbaySBDC, small businesses that leverage new technologies display higher job growth and higher revenue growth than ‘Low-tech’ SMBs.

What Is an IT Strategy?

An IT strategy is a comprehensive plan outlining how the organization will successfully use technology to meet IT and business requirements. This is also considered as an element that can support and shape an organization's overall business growth.

For small businesses, it is even more crucial to emphasize building an effective IT strategy that would completely align with the organization’s core goals. With small businesses, executives have the option of experimenting with their IT strategy to effectively understand which would work best for them. Hence, not having too many layers of management works as a benefit in disguise for smaller organizations, giving them the opportunity to make a greater impact using their IT strategy.

How Can Small Businesses Benefit from an Effective IT Strategy?

The growing importance of IT business strategies highlights the drastic rise in technology as an essential element aiding in business success. IT would be the first step in setting up new business models, enhancing productivity, and supporting interactions inside and outside the organization. It is also essential that the strategy consider all the requirements of the organization and its key shareholders.

Some models that would help you build a robust IT strategy are:
  • Develop a timeline and spending forecast for your IT strategy
  • A thorough understanding of your current structure and your goals
  • In-depth analysis of your IT's core strengths and weaknesses
  • Keep a close check on your resources that will help shape your IT strategy

“The advancement of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don't really even notice it, so it's part of everyday life.”

Bill Gates, Co-founder of Microsoft

What Are the Best Practices for Planning IT Strategy?

The best practices to follow for effectively planning your IT strategies are:

Evaluate the Company's Existing Business Strategy

The strategic plan for IT should align with the organization's business strategy effectively. It should also have a clear roadmap that would help improve compensation and assist in effective interaction with customers and stakeholders. Small businesses can fine tune their strategy using minor tweaks that wouldn’t largely impact the current functioning of the organization.

Prevent Any Delays in Developing the Strategic Plan

Despite being an essential component, strategic IT planning shouldn't be time-consuming. It is essential that there be no delay in developing the strategic plan so that you can eliminate any possible loss of focus, relevance, and diminished currency. Small businesses have an upper hand here as getting through approvals and development isn’t a lengthy task for them; however it all depends on their existing workload.

Ensure That Specific Metrics of Success Are Set

It is advised to keep different performance indicators to track the strategic planning process successfully. Therefore, measuring and reporting these KPIs is something that is recommended.

Some studies found that about 75, 76, and 80% of organizations engage in strategic IT planning, but these strategic IT plans are not implemented extensively. An Australian survey also found that the proportion claiming to undertake strategic IT planning ranged from 58% in large organizations to 29% in medium-sized organizations and 19% in small organizations.

Detailed Analysis of IT Strategy Planning

The process of aligning IT with the organization is ideally called strategic IT planning. A technology strategy plan describes the general technology-based business management procedures that an organization uses to run its business.

To build an effective IT strategy for a business, you must evaluate the company's overall strategic planning. This will help the organization understand where IT business strategies can improve company operations.

This strategic planning will help evaluate the company's technological resources and add a competitive edge to the company's functioning. This formulation would include determining the company's goals and objectives, vision, mission, and strategies.

Some might feel that curating a business strategy for small businesses is difficult and takes a tremendous amount of effort.  To help with this, there is an easy six-step process that smaller organizations can follow to ease the process of developing an IT strategy for their business.

The main steps to follow are:
  • Overview of the planning process
  • Align with the company's long-term vision
  • Identify any possible gaps for strategic IT process
  • Curate an ideal schedule and tech budget
  • Implement the strategic planning process
  • Evaluate the results of the process


Conclusion

Using business strategy technology effectively would directly affect the organization's performance in the long run. IT strategies either make or break an organization if not done accurately. As a result, small businesses are in greater need of an ideal IT strategy that would assist them in making an impact in the market where they function. Citing this aspect, the company also stands in a position of competitive advantage within its industry also in turn alarming the business leaders to focus more on how they handle the impact.

FAQ


Q1: Why Is Strategic IT Planning Important for Small Businesses?

Information technology is a crucial component for any business, and businesses also heavily rely on IT to survive and thrive in their respective industries. Therefore, an IT strategy for business effectively outlines business goals and also outlays guidelines for businesses to achieve them.

Q2: What Are the Major Concerns of IT Strategy?

Some of the significant challenges that organizations face with IT business strategies are:
• Weak and improper existing strategy
• Ineffective training
• Limited or lack of resources

Q3: What Are the Benefits of an IT Strategy?

A well-curated and executed IT strategy would have the following:
• Would enable delegation of decision making
• Provides proactive response to change
• Establishes parameters for creative thinking

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Mobile app development innovations help in many ways, such as: Improve your brand's relationship with your customers Offer 24/7 access to your business Get excellent customer insights Efficiently market your product online Save on additional marketing costs Boost employee efficiency by increasing engagement Improve communication shreds down the busy work and Streamline the data Generate a new revenue stream from ads targeted at in-app purchases. As a result, you meet customer expectations efficiently, allowing you to expand your business and attract potential customers. Your customers and potential customers are always looking for something new and exciting to experience and adopt. Sooner or later, they make habits of seeing something, and then they start thinking of that mobile app as a standard benchmark to look up to. Talking about the scalability of a mobile application, there is a lot of scope to improve using innovative technologies, and all minor to major updates take you from where you are to where you want to be. Finding the right mix of technologies will help your business grow and expand. 4. Tying Everything Together Business growth for small-scale businesses starts with new inputs and strategic technological investments in mobile app development. Although they sound promising, striking the right balance to implement innovative technologies relies heavily on rigorous predictive analysis. Tools and technologies help meet customer expectations at scale and grow the business beyond imagination with the power of innovation.

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C3 AI introduces C3 Generative AI Product Suite to Provide Transformative UX

C3 AI | February 01, 2023

On January 31, 2023, C3 AI, a leading enterprise AI application software firm, announced the launch of the C3 Generative AI Product Suite with its first product, C3 Generative AI for Enterprise Search. C3 Generative AI for Enterprise Search offers enterprise users a transformative experience by utilizing a natural language interface to quickly discover, retrieve, and present all relevant data throughout an enterprise's information systems corpus. The C3 Generative AI Product Suite incorporates the most advanced models, such as GPT-3 and ChatGPT, as well as the latest AI capabilities from companies such as Google, Open AI, and academia, into C3 AI's enterprise AI solutions. The C3 Generative AI Product Suite integrates advanced transformer models into C3 AI's pre-built AI applications, allowing businesses to exploit these models across their value chains more quickly. C3 Generative AI will speed up transformation efforts across business functions and industries, such as supply chain, reliability, sustainability, CRM, ESG, oil & gas, aerospace, utilities, CPG, financial services, healthcare, and military and intelligence. C3 Generative AI is slated for public release in March 2023 and will be showcased at the C3 Transform international users' group conference on March 7, 2023, in Boca Raton, Florida. About C3 AI Founded in 2009, C3 AI is a leading provider of Enterprise AI software for driving digital transformation. Its proprietary, model-driven AI architecture significantly improves data science and application development. It allows clients to use the C3 AI Platform to create, implement, and manage large-scale AI, predictive analytics, and IoT applications. Furthermore, a diverse array of turnkey AI applications enables even faster development and implementation. C3 AI provides significant industry knowledge to help organizations start their digital transformation, from reliability and preparedness to supply chain optimization and energy management.

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GENERAL AI, SOFTWARE, FUTURE TECH

Cogito Announces Innovations in Real-time Conversation Intelligence for Contact Centers

Cogito Corp | January 27, 2023

Cogito, a company that helps businesses with real-time coaching and guidance, has announced new products that will make real-time conversation intelligence in call centers better. The new products are made to help agents in the call center answer customer questions more quickly and effectively. Topic-based machine learning models, real-time transcription with emotion AI markup, self-service admin for easy topic generation, and secure redaction of personally identifiable information (PII) during calls are some of the new features. With these new features, contact centers will have a level of intelligence that has never been seen before. This will help them understand customer conversations better and respond quickly to changing customer needs. Joshua Feast, CEO and Co-Founder of Cogito, said, “Contact center agents and their leaders take the brunt of the service experience, with customer interactions becoming increasingly complex." He added, "We view seamless, integrated conversational AI and emotion AI capabilities as necessary to support today’s workforce." Additionally, he said, "With over a decade of advanced R&D, we differentiate based on our ability to go beyond traditional speech analytics." He further commented, "Our unique combination of behavior insights and real-time natural language processing has culminated into a powerful agent assist and coaching platform that we continue to add to and expand upon." Finally, he said, "The conversation AI solutions announced today are another step forward for the company and our ability to deeply assist an industry that needs human-centered support and guidance.” (Source - Businesswire) The solutions can pick up on more than 200 voice and behavior cues in speech and give real-time advice on how to respond to important topics of conversation. With self-service admin portals and the ability to change conversation themes by line of business, team, or skill group, they also make it easy for operations leaders and supervisors to manage and help their staff. About Cogito Cogito is a software company based in Boston that focuses on AI for emotions and conversations to help contact centers and front-line teams get coaching and advice in real time. Their technology analyzes how people talk to each other to give live guidance during calls and real-time feedback on how customers feel. This helps agents improve their effectiveness, empathy, and performance. Many well-known brands, including five of the Fortune 25 companies, use Cogito's technology to improve their connection with customers and elevate their team members' well-being. Cogito is venture-backed by companies such as OpenView Ventures, Romulus Capital, and Salesforce Ventures. They are committed to producing innovative technology, driving customer success, and helping people live more productive lives.

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INNOVATION,SOFTWARE,FUTURE TECH

Lumos Launches App Governance Platform to Streamline IT, Strengthen Security, and Cut Costs

Lumos | January 30, 2023

Lumos has launched the App Governance Platform, a solution that automates access requests, enforces least privilege, and eliminates extra SaaS spending while strengthening security. The App Governance Platform is an innovative security solution that can help organizations lower their SaaS costs and improve their security at the same time. With Lumos' App Governance Platform, organizations have the ability to easily control which users have access to which SaaS applications. The platform provides visibility into app usage, entitlements, and spending, giving customers the power to control licenses and cloud permissions. This platform makes it easier to give access to apps, keep track of who has access, and take access away. The App Governance Platform makes security easier and stronger while lowering SaaS costs. It does this by automating access requests, enforcing least privilege, and monitoring usage. The platform aims to remove technology silos between IT, security, compliance, and finance and help IT leaders transform the company's SaaS stack into a capital-efficient one. The CEO of Lumos says the platform helps IT leaders build an efficient infrastructure for businesses to run smoothly and securely while meeting the demands of the CFO. Mark Jaques, Director of Information Security at Vox Media, says Lumos is a "game changer" that will help drive costs down, increase security, and automate IT tickets. About Lumos Lumos is a platform that streamlines app governance, addressing common challenges such as software cost explosion, excessive admin access, and a large number of JIRA tickets. It automates access requests and ensures least privilege, saving time and effort for IT, security, compliance, and finance teams. Its granular admin settings reduce IT tickets and time-to-resolution. Lumos provides visibility into app usage, entitlements, and spending, enabling effective decision-making and leading to cost savings. The result is reduced IT support costs, improved access, and simplified audits.

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