IT Leadership Blog

Hello all. We are IT Leadership, a small consultancy advising small businesses and not-for-profits on making IT work for them. In such organisations, IT responsibility often rests with finance or other non-IT directors.

Our blog discusses topics of interest to our clients: amongst them small business IT and project management. We hope you find them interesting and useful !

We work with lots of small to medium-sized businesses who’s IT has evolved without any oversight other than cost. Most of them rely on the usual so-called productivity applications (email, word processing, spreadsheets) to run their businesses. They may have an accounting or ERP system, but day-to-day, stuff gets done by the workers using email, word processing and spreadsheets.

One of the results of lack of oversight in this way is IT friction, as we call it. PCs gradually slow down. Newer PCs have different versions of the software on them, and incompatibilities creep in between them and lower versions. Workers have to save files as older versions for some staff. The major result of this is that things take longer to do: the IT systems have added friction into the business processes, causing them to run more slowly.

Largely, this is a hidden cost. It happens gradually, so it’s not immediately obvious. But think, if everyone in the company takes 30 minutes longer a day to do stuff than they might, that’s 2.5 hours a week when they are either waiting, or doing work which is actually unnecessary. If you have 15 employees in this situation, that’s 37.5 hours a week. Put another way, that’s another full-time employee !

Our IT Health Check service helps to identify all sources of IT friction, saving your organisation time and money.