Blogs

Crisp and crunchy

Finance | John Tate | 23 Jan 2009

How much priority should IT projects be given in the current climate?

January kicked off with considerable excitement at my home. My 18 year old daughter is in her gap year and works for a local leisure company. They have a shop on the premises that sells snacks and drinks to customers and a batch of crisps reached their sell by date at the end of the first week in January. The leisure company had a policy of giving staff any foodstuff that reached the end of its saleable life. So cometh the day the staff enjoyed a super mega feasting of crisps.

2009 kicks off with lots of unfinished work to do on the IT front. Many initiatives have not gone according to plan. Is there the money to put these right or are they past their sell by date?

The first advice I would give is not to be afraid of cancelling a current IT project if it is going very badly or if the money is not there to drive it through to a successful conclusion. If there is the chance to get the project back on track this is the preferred option but too many charities battle on with doomed initiatives that can waste huge amounts of time any money.

In terms of new initiatives, the survey on accounting software sheds some interesting light. The percentage of charities looking for a new system has dropped from last year. No surprise in the current climate. Also, user satisfaction levels with current systems have risen in the main in the last year which is encouraging - and perhaps in part explaining the reduction in interest in changing applications.

Looking at one result in particular from the survey, web enabling accounting  systems remains a thorn in the side.  With a web interface, staff can more easily work remotely, allowing branch offices and staff working from home to process accounting transactions and access key information. With the increased emphasis on transparency in the charity sector a web front end can provide the capacity to open up limited finance information to any cat-egory of stakeholder.

Providing a web interface for reporting/enquiries is not necessarily a huge job  for a software author as there are myriad third party tools that can help make  this happen. Providing a web interface to allow users to post transactions is not nearly as straightforward. In many cases this requires the software author to rewrite a large proportion of the programs for inputting data. These programs can be very complex and the software author will need people with good web design/development skills to write this. With R&D budgets under pressure among IT suppliers this can be slow to happen. If you are looking to invest in a web-based transaction process-ing system, take care to check that all the functionality you require is available and that you part with your cash only when you are sure that the product works correctly in this way.

I have set myself three personal targets for 2009. Firstly, to make sure the company  I spend most of my time working in uses its CRM system to maximum effect. I want to make sure all new contacts are captured and that the interface with Microsoft Office  is fully used by all staff so we can easily see all the contact we have with our cli-ents/partners/prospects. Easy to set as a target but difficult to implement as it will need everyone in the company right behind  this initiative.

Secondly, to get some training on the tools I use. There are some niggles in my use of email/spreadsheets/word processing and the CRM system that waste hours of  my time each month. Probably an hour  or two of training will sort these out and  give me a good return on investment for the  training costs.

Thirdly, I want to stretch the use of the web to engage with our customers/partners and the rest of the outside world in new and exciting ways. I do not plan any major tech-nology changes but see a lot of niche (cheap) opportunities that can be developed.

Who's Who: John Tate