Systems

Systems

                We run a lot of systems but not do we set priorities right?  Is project business case the best metrics for good investment? Maybe not.

                IT systems should support the most valuable assets of the company. The most valuable assets are (in the order of priority):

• Owners
• Customers
• Employees
• Knowledge
• Products

Owners are the most demanding. They need a strategic vision and actions to realise it. This requires no special IT support.  But they need high quality financial information. 

Next most important system is CRM. We need a central repository of all of our customer information. However it somewhat should go over  a traditional CRM solution.  We also should be informed about their needs and problems. In that way we could offer them good solutions , and build customer groups and market segments.

Employees deserve the  same attention as customers. (Fort he HR department they are customers).  However here competences have a higher significance than problems.

Knowledge management has many challenges but now there are simple and straightforward solutions to store it.

Shareholders are also like customers in order that we have to serve them.  However the only thing we sell them is financial information and vision.

Products are knowledge, however very specific knowledge (e.g. detailed product descriptions, or source code) because they need more details and accuracy than knowledge in general.

Which systems serve these needs the best?  There is no way around a classic accounting, financial reporting system to provide information to shareholders and authorities. Knowledge and products seems to be the simplest thing; using Wikis is widely accepted for these purposes. Customer/employee information is a bit more difficult; personal information is often shared on social networks. Could we invite all of our clients and employees into a professional group on LinkedIn?  The difficulty with this approach is that there are information which can’t be shared (e.g. for not helping the competition).  So we may need a two level system.  At the end what we need is a Wiki –Social network like database with different level of access.

We may have this new kind of two or multi level systems, but we need processes. Customers must be visited, orders processed, products and services delivered, bills and wages paid… This requires process and structured information support which is linked to the knowledge. This is what traditional ERP systems do.