Importance of planning and investment in IT Infrastructure

IT investment requires complimentary assets in order for it to be truly valuable to an organization. It has been said that for every dollar of IT investment, there should be several dollars in organizational change.

This means that the organization may need to make organizational adjustments to properly align itself with the new IT infrastructure or tools. Perhaps the investment is solely made in training employees to be proficient with the new IT infrastructure. For example, if the IT investment is in a new data warehouse and DBMS, it makes perfect sense to invest adequate resources in training its end users to be proficient in running reports to extract the information they need.

An article on cable360.net suggests some practical solutions that information technology and business leaders should consider when implementing an IT or data strategy. They say that data should be pushed to specific users, not pulled, and that the data should be unequivocally accurate with the ability for users to verify by drilling down to the most basic data from TPS, like an individual invoice or transaction record.

Gerry Cox, Director of finance with Gerling Insurance suggests that businesses have wrongly tried to create or generate reports from their transaction processing systems. Unfortunately, these systems are built to process transactions, and not to analyze data, and thus, better analytic and reporting systems must be implemented.

In the end, a firm can ensure the value of their data is realized if they follow the previously discussed principles. The principles include careful firm-wide planning against goals, complimentary investment in training, and process re-engineering, and ensuring data integrity.