IT plays a crucial role in any business, do it right and it can be a powerful arm of your business that helps to deliver on your goals. Do it wrong and it can be a time and money black hole that potentially holds your business back.
Do you have an IT Strategy?
Most accounting firms find it difficult to align IT expenditure to their overall business strategy.
IT is such a large part of any modern accounting firm that only seeing it as a cost centre and not as the vehicle that drives your business strategy is a missed opportunity.
Traditionally when firms outsource IT, in many cases they have actually only outsourced IT Support. The role of an IT Manager or CIO incorporates all facets of IT within a business (budgets, risk, governance, strategy, performance, etc), not just Support.
These gaps are generally being filled partially by internal staff or not at all. This leads to partners feeling like nobody is responsible or held accountable for the return on your firms investments in IT.
The right IT strategy and solution can allow your Accounting Firm to step up your service offerings and create a more collaborative and productive office.
How to choose?
The rapidly changing IT landscape makes it hard for a firm to decide what IT solutions to choose, as it can be difficult to know how your business stacks up against ‘best in class’ firms. This results in uncertainty about how much or how little to spend on IT.
Many productivity improvement projects lose momentum and often fail to deliver on their goals and ability to measure an ROI.
This can be caused by barriers such as tools and processes that have been implemented, but are not being used to their full potential, limited visibility of actual productivity improvements and lack of project management and leadership.
Without an IT Champion in place to drive projects they can quickly lose direction and in some cases never get off the ground.
IT projects can also fail because opportunity cost can be hard to calculate as projects are often undertaken ad hoc, with little knowledge of alternative solutions.
What can you do right now?
If you’re worried that IT is taking time away from billable staff, or you’re experiencing downtime in the business you need to understand how much time and money is being wasted. Use the IT Productivity Calculator to understand how productive your IT actually is.
Once you start looking at IT as an enabler and not an overhead, you will begin to grow your bottom line and gain a competitive advantage.
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