IT: A Waste of Time & Money?

By: Alistair Baker, CEO & Founder, Cogent Business Limited

A business cannot really place too much intelligent focus on cost. However, costs don't just appear as
cost of goods sold and expenses items on your accounting books. Intangible costs have a significant
bearing on a business and are all too frequently overlooked when looking at the overall efficiency of a
business. Naturally you must have a great ability to manage costs through negotiating better supplier
deals and better control of your stock and working capital needs. But how much time are you spending
thinking about waste?

I am thinking of situations where performance that is less than the best often goes unnoticed or
ignored. To put this in context, I spent some time recently discussing with some service-related companies
the importance of having effective IT that works for them, just like a utility that you reliably switch
on… working like Routine Magic, as we call it in Cogent Enterprise.

A couple of customers weren't very happy with their IT, but just wanted someone to come and fix it
when it broke down, which seemed to be a fairly common occurrence with a combination of hardware,
software and networking problems in both companies. They really wanted to cut their IT costs to the
bare bones even though a lot of time was spent by employees using IT in their day-to-day jobs. As the
discussions went on, it became clear that when IT failed, people struggled trying to fix it themselves,
gave up or did something non-work-related while the problem was being fixed.

When I started to really get them to see how this inefficient less-than-the-best level of work affected
productivity, overall energy levels and morale, the lights went on: the inefficiency and associated cost of
poor technology was not the money being spent on products and reactive support but the money
being wasted through lost working time by not doing productive work, making money or developing
new business opportunities. Inefficiency = waste.

You should also add to the equation employee morale, which is unlikely to be at its highest when
colleagues are equipped with poor tools for the job; after all, why should someone maximise their
energy in your business if you are minimising your investment in them?

For your own business, work out where productive time is lost through inefficient waste and then you
can start to calculate how much waste really costs your business.

Then begin to consider a plan to eliminate it. Technology is, after all, only one example. If technology
figures in your list of waste-management problems, then you really should talk to us about how Cogent
Enterprise can support you with our Routine Magic to minimise your waste and inefficiency.

Learn more about Routine Magic™, GreenBox, BlackBox, SafeBox, and Zoned Branding.