How Important is Information Technology?

Sometimes it feels like IT has become the master of us. It is something we like to moan about that is the responsibility of a small department, an IT manager, or an outsourced provider to maintain. When it works we don’t notice it, when it doesn’t work it’s a huge pain.

IT stands for Information Technology. It is the infrastructure and connectivity that enables the flow of information through your business. It is crucial to everyone, hence the frustrations when it doesn’t work as it should.

Just like your health, there are certain things that you can do to manage your own IT and there are things that need to be done by professionals. At Emerald we run our own bespoke pro-active monitoring on all our customer networks to ensure we keep the heartbeat and crucial functions operational. But we won’t fully investigate every cough or cold unless the symptoms indicate we should. Over the last 12 months we have been running a series of training programmes with customers to inform everyone how best to treat coughs and colds themselves and how to detect if they might be more sinister and need our attention.

There is also an individual business decision to be made about how healthy you want to be. We all know eating and living healthily is important but sometimes we’ll drink the wine and eat the takeaway because we want to. One of the first things we do with new customers is sit down and discuss the current flow of information through the business. There are always duplications. But often technology interrupts natural workflow and everything we do is a compromise between human behaviour and automation. If work is nothing but a series of forms on a tablet, we’d probably rather a robot do the job.  

IT is crucially important to every organisation. It drives innovation. It informs decision-makers. It improves productivity in every part of your business. But we must remember, we are the masters.