Business development can be limited by constraints. Occasionally these constraints disappear temporarily and when they do you must seize the opportunity.

Businesses and sectors vary enormously on the surface but when you boil them down they are fundamentally very similar. Most have customers and suppliers; in the middle is your business. Your business is a series of processes that provide a product or service to your customers. These business processes are run by your people of course but supported by computers in their various forms.

Computers are strange beasts; their strength can also be their weakness. They are, of course, very good at following rules and being structured but when you need to change your processes breaking these IT structures and rules and redefining them can be costly.

Today’s climate presents many reasons to change processes, cutting costs, reducing lead-times, improving quality and services to name a few. Having agility in your business processes is essential to growth if not survival.

This can leave you in a tough position. You need to change but as David Walliams’ character in Little Britain would say, “Computer says NO!”

Once in a while “Computer says YES”. This happens when a new implementation comes along. The constraints of the old system disappear and new opportunities are presented. An opportunity to rethink the entire business process may be available, a new dawn – time to take great strides forward. So why on earth would you recreate your old business process in the new IT system? If given a calculator would you still insist on addition by hand when the calculator offers speed and accuracy?

The danger here is that the new business processes suffer even more than the old. They have the new constraints of the new IT systems and the old, now artificial constraints, of the old IT systems and business processes.

So why do so many IT implementation lead to a recreation of the old at least in part? There may be many reasons for this, discomfort with too much change at once, lack of clarity, lack of planning, failure to recognise the opportunity or communication. It is probably all of these along with another very important one…

The users and stakeholders of the business processes have a job to do running the business. The IT team are consumed in the development processes. So who has the time, focus, skills, experience and energy to redesign the business processes within the future constraints of the new IT systems considered?

This is where 3t come in. We are unique in fully understanding IT implementations and business process development. With this unique perspective our clients can see the full benefit of new IT reflected in new business processes. Business processes with less cost, more speed, higher quality and better service without placing impossible requests on the IT team. So why not swap the straight jacket for a flying jacket?