]Welcome to “Do IT Right,” a 9-part series on how to succeed in the most important areas of IT management. In this series we introduce you to Simmons & Hawking, a fictional law firm that is scaling up its outdated IT infrastructure, and the relatable challenges faced by their IT stakeholders. In part 8, we saw James, a member of the finance team, discover how automating IT accounting can save money. Now, in the last stage, he’s learning how data and analytics bring everything full circle so they can continue to make better IT decisions moving forward–and continue on a successful IT journey!
James has a good handle on all of the accounting needs and feels confident in his abilities to keep it running smoothly with automated processes.
However, James begins to realize it doesn’t end there. After a few meetings with his superiors, he learns that he doesn’t have the answers to important questions. He cannot provide solid information in regard to the trends and outliers in their spend, assets, usage, and billing functions and the reasons why certain issues or changes have occurred.
Between all of these different functions, endless amounts of data are collected. That’s imperative, but data is only as useful as James’ ability to analyze and make sense of the information. When data is analyzed correctly and understood, it can be used in future decision making that benefits the company as a whole.
Unfortunately, most of the time, businesses leave all of this critical knowledge, data, and information on the table. As a result, time and money are wasted in the process and it hinders the growth and success of the company.
James is able to keep things organized and running just well enough, but he is aware that his efforts are only going to work for the short term unless he can continue to drive business forward with the insights gained from every facet of his IT environment and workflow.
In an effort to try to organize and make sense of the data, he tries to do it all by hand. But James quickly begins to realize that it is a nearly impossible task and something he alone, or even a full team of people, can’t handle efficiently and effectively.
There is too much information to sort through and he will never be able to make any substantial headway on analyzing the data for answering questions and making future decisions.
James needs access to a system that allows him to analyze all of the data that is equally as efficient as the IT infrastructure they currently have in place.
The good news is there are actually dedicated systems to help make this all possible and take a lot of the burden off James and other team members.
An organized and dedicated platform that ALSO provides financial analysis capabilities (like charts and reports) has the ability to help James and his team save time and ample amounts of money, make more informed decisions, and customize their data in various ways to help suit different business needs.
