You've been nurturing your upcoming business and the people around it. No doubt, you've observed slow but gradual dependence on IT for most of your business activities namely, accounting, inventory, attendance, payroll, customer management, sales, etc.
Accordingly, you may also have procured computer terminals and servers. Very likely, you'd have connected them with cables that run under your feet in the entire company. But you won't see any improvement in turnaround for internal as well as external work processes unless you do one critical thing: pre-emptively fine-tune your IT team.
Let's look at PVR Cinemas. The year, 1995.
PVR was a small company. It engaged in cinema operations and focused on automation as a key driver for customer satisfaction and business expansion. The company kept "the vision of business expansion" paramount, as it started putting in place IT infrastructure and people around it, explains Atul Luthra, head (IT) of PVR.
Today, the 10-year old multiplex major is listed in BSE and NSE, and its income for fiscal 2007 was Rs.171.96 crore.
But who knows: in 10 years duration your budding company may scale even greater heights. Thus, besides the watchwords of business vision, you'd do well to look at a few other key aspects while carving out your IT department:
Check the functions of your IT team
Technologically you need to observe the center of action in your IT infrastructure. So, if yours were an Internet dependent business, you'd need to figure out and ensure the way your various databases are handled. Besides, you have to demarcate each category of tasks that your IT team performs on a daily basis and assign responsibility for each of those.
Ensure growth management
Most small business IT departments are built over a period of years and driven by the needs of the business. As business multiplies, organizing the IT department can become difficult. At this juncture, it's necessary to understand the difference between the role of the head of IT and that of the Chief Information Officer (CIO).
The head of IT performs the routine "lights on" function of keeping the systems up and running. An IT head takes care of the day-to-day operations of the IT department. The CIO, on the other hand, would rather be preoccupied with strategizing to optimize IT usage in accordance to business requirements, to keep costs down, to take care of scalability needs, etc.
Luthra adds, "A CIO has to be a part of the management to understand business goals, ensure adherence to legal policies, and strategize to meet long term business goals."
Deploy balanced IT staff
In a growing organisation, the IT department takes a lot of flak for want of sufficient staff to support desktop management. In such cases, a dissatisfied business user results in inefficient business operations. In addition to deploying enough staff for desktop support, particular focus needs also be given to network administrators, as they're the architects of optimal bandwidth usage, smooth application performance, etc.
Set up an IT advisory
IT's primary role is to help achieve business objectives. Thus, it'd be prudent to put in place a committee of business department heads who would come out with requirements keeping in mind business expansion plans, user requirements, etc.
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