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Money

Calling All SMEs Who Need Help Understanding Their Business Assets

Sarah Smith
Mar 2010

It is a fact that no business is allowed the "privilege" of being able to stand still and admire the view. Regardless of how successful you are at any point in time, all businesses need to be planning for the future and working out their next steps, whether this is purely about maintaining the current position, or whether the business has more ambitious plans to expand into new markets or product lines.

Any business that is in an enviable position in terms of market share and profitability today can soon become a failing concern if it sits on its laurels. It needs at least to make sure that it has plans in place to ensure that its employee base is stable, that its IT is robust, and that economic change or scientific or technology development do not render its offering redundant or priced out of the market.

Most businesses, especially at this time of economic hardship, have been struggling to survive and are now in the position where they must plan how they are going to take advantage of the promised economic recovery. Senior management must be setting the strategy, and creating the plans to implement this strategy, to ensure the changes they need to make in order to thrive in the future are in place and are followed through and achieved.

“During times of change, a key requirement of the CIO and senior management team is to understand their organisation in terms of its key business capabilities, with the supporting people, processes and IT systems.”

In short, all businesses are subject to change, whether through internal demand for change or through external influences forcing change, and the ability to complete the required change quickly and effectively is a key factor in making a business successful.

Decision Support Tools

Decision support tools are available that are focused on two areas. Firstly, capturing knowledge about the organisation, secondly and most importantly, using that knowledge to support decision making by giving executives the visibility of their business assets and the insight they need to understand the impact of their decisions.

Obviously, to be able to interrogate a tool, the information regarding a particular organisation must first be entered into the tool. This is not an insignificant task; however, there are tools and strategies available to help.

Firstly, much of this information is often already available in an organisation; the issue is that it is not captured in any one place. Often there will be Excel spreadsheets, Access databases and various form of presentations containing the information. In this format, it is almost impossible to give the overall view. A good decision support tool should have access to various tools that allow these disparate data sources to be automatically imported from other applications such as Excel and Access. Some information, such as that from presentations, will inevitably have to be manually entered, and again a good decision support tool will make this entry as quick and easy to complete as possible. After all, inputting information is a means to an end – not the end itself!

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