Developing Business IT Systems
The benifits and drawbacks.
Intro
IT systems are an important factor in any business, but this does not mean that they are being used to your disadvantage. In this flyer I will be discussing the Pros and Cons of developing the IT system in your business.
Benefits
There are many benefits to upgrading your IT systems. One of which is the productivity gains that the new systems will bring. New IT systems are faster and more efficient than older ones meaning that tasks will be able to be done quicker and more efficiently and data will be accessible quicker than it was before. The productivity gain will mean more tasks are completed and work is completed in less time to what it did before.
Another benefit to upgrading your businesses IT systems if that there will be cost reductions for the business over time. Upgrading IT systems means that tasks that might have been done manually (like backups) can be done automatically by servers and individual machines so that less money is spent on paying people to perform the tasks manually. As the machines will be much faster than older systems, tasks that might have taken a long time to complete, may take less time to complete. This then means labour costs will go down as they won’t be paying the employees to take a long time to do tasks.
As well as these, there will be an increased profitability over time. This is brought be the speed of tasks being completed, so more tasks for clients are completed, meaning the total time for clients tasks are decreased. This means more clients can be dealt with within a certain period of time (e.g. a year), generating more profit for the business. Furthermore, improving IT systems can improve customer service. If a company’s workstations are slow and inefficient, upgrading would mean that they have more power, meaning that the workstations are going to be easier to access customer files. This will mean that if a customer is on the phone to an agent representing the company and the workstation the agent is using is quick, then the phone call will be more efficient and will take less of the customer’s time. Upgrading workstations also means they will have the latest operating systems and will have access to more recent versions of the software that the company uses, which might not have been available with older workstations.
Finally the integration of IT systems can bring benefits to the business. This means that extra systems (such as file storage, Email servers, Etc.) can be integrated into the current or new systems so that they are accessible from the environment that employees are familiar with and they don’t have to use special machines in order to access those systems.
Drawbacks
Although there are befits to upgrading you business’ IT systems, there are a few drawbacks as well.
One of which is the initial cost of upgrading the IT systems. This could mean thousands of pounds are spent on the upgrade. Even more will be spent if you are installing servers as well as workstations. This is the main thing that discourages businesses to upgrade their IT systems. But the upgrade will save/bring in money (as discussed earlier) as well as costing money. So these savings/extra profits could go towards paying back the cost of the IT system.
Another drawback to upgrading your IT system is that there will be an impact on business procedures. For example, this will cause disruption to the workers as they will not be able to access their workstations (or files on the network if upgrading a file server) whilst the upgrade is taking place.
Furthermore, the new systems may have a different operating systems installed on then and upgraded software may have a different way of doing things (for example, it may have a different layout of where each task shortcut is shown). This will need to be explained to staff as they may not know how to use the new software/operating system and therefor will need training, which may cost extra money. T5his impact will not only happen on the staff at work but could happen at home if they use teleworking or on the go if they use a business PC/tablet/smartphone.
In addition, the integration of legacy systems may be an issue when introducing new systems. Old systems sometimes may have issues joining together with the new systems so you may have to be selective when it comes to purchasing the new IT systems to make sure that they are compatible with the legacy systems.
Finally, security is an issue, no matter what system you have. Security needs to be bought on top of the new systems to protect data on the systems and to protect client data to comply with the Data Protection Act.