Strategic IT Planning

IT planning requires that the design engineer has a clear understanding of the business requirements for the company both now and in the future. Within the IT world hardware life cycles tend to be in the order of three to five years with software life cycles turning over every two to three years. These life cycles determine the return on investments made by companies when developing and deploying new systems.

Our experience of dealing with startup and growing companies means that we are well placed to advise you not only what is the best system for your current but also how those systems can grow to meet your future needs. It is important to design, build and support a network and computer system using products that can grow and diversify in line with your business plans.

A classic example of this would be investing in Microsoft Small Business Server 2000 (SBS 2000) when your business plan shows the number of employees growing to more than 50 within the life cycle of the product. SBS 2000 cannot support this number of users and therefore you will incur the costs of migrating your SBS 2000 security information and user settings into the new Microsoft Back Office 2000 infrastructure. It is important to weigh up if the upgrade cost and risk of disruption can be averted by installing a Back Office 2000 suite from the outset. Additionally, the enforced security model of SBS can cause significant design problems for multi-site organisations.

In a similar manner the technical design for an e-commerce enabled website requires that the predicted growth of the site is built into the original specification for the design. For example, many websites use Microsoft Access database tables for storing information collected through the pages of the site. If this data is not business critical or a revenue source the use of Microsoft Access is acceptable. However, a true e-commerce site which is collecting payments from customers, requires that the order information must be safely stored. Depending on the number of potential clients who will be buying products in the course of a day the use of Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2 database server or Oracle database server should be considered. If a planned upgrade to this more powerful database system is not included in the original website technical design it is quite likely that the entire site will need to be re written to accommodate the improved Database Server. This is a business risk which can be completely eliminated by effective strategic IT planning.

We have outlined above just two of the many reasons why competent strategic IT planning can not only save your company from business disruption; but, also a significant amount of money. Many companies have lived to regret network systems installed in haste, spending a short period time in consultation with industry expertise is yet another example of an 'insurance policy' against unforeseen problems. For more information please complete an information request form and one of our team will contact you to discuss your requirements