A strategic opportunity to gain a competitive advantage

It is only 30 years since Tim Berners-Lee invented the Internet, but its influence has been profound, not only in our personal lives, but also in the way we do business.

When we discuss changes in business IT the first thought is often about office infrastructure like PCs, printers, communications processes and social media. But what is really important is how it enables the re-engineering of a business. With my team of software engineers, we have spent the last 25 years writing innovative programmes and constructing databases that transform how a business works.

For example:

• 23 years ago we recognised an opportunity to utilise the internet by selling magazine subscriptions direct to readers. We worked with a partner who had a database of all magazines available and set up a separate fulfilment operation. This is now a multi–million-pound business.
• 14 years ago it was normal for the main contractor on a construction project to provide end-of-project documentation in a set of paper folders, often extending to tens of thousands of pages. Not only were they expensive to make and store, but they were very difficult to use. Today, this is all digital. The documentation can be created off-site, is significantly more comprehensive and comes with a bespoke search function. Consequently, the creation of the manual can now be handed over to a specialist sub-contractor instead of being built in-house by the main contractor – which historically was often done in haste as the handover deadline loomed.
• Today we are also working with a global pharmaceutical company that has developed a very complicated algorithm to assist each of the 100-plus countries they work in, to predict their sales as part of their ongoing strategic planning exercise. Our role is to provide assistance to these country businesses, error-trap any incomplete results, and combine it all into a global summary that can also be run against various ‘scenario changes’. We deploy a whole range of bespoke database cleaning and validation tools and then provide presentation modelling facilities to turn all this data into information that can be used by marketing users.

Most IT operations are in the hands of the accountant in a SME company, even though accountancy qualifications include no formal IT training. Sometimes this can lead to IT investments being seen purely as an increase in overheads rather than as a strategic opportunity to gain a competitive advantage.