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If your IT does not scale with your business your (business) growth will stall.
Is your IT infrastructure keeping pace with the growth of your business? As your business grows you need to implement structurally different solutions for a number of things. Think of 1.5cm ant that survives a 1.5 meter fall and walks away if nothing happened. A 1.5 meter human (5 foot in old money) that falls from 150 meters (500ft) would not survive. And even a 1.80 meter person (6ft) shouldn’t even try.
Such scale differences also apply to IT. In applications, networks, storage, servers and workstations. As your organization grows, your IT needs to grow in sync. Or your systems will grind to a halt, which causes loss of productivity with your employees. This can result in a lower gross margin and profit, even if your turnover is on the rise.
Bland, Tasteful or spicy?
The student association I used to be a member of expected you to take your turn cooking now and again. You’d cook for 30, 40 or 50 people. And that’s totally different than cooking for a small group or for yourself. It takes longer for the food to come to a boil, so you need to sustain the boil for a shorter period of time. But the biggest change is in adding herbs and spices. When you cook for 40 people you need to add 10 times the herbs and spices compared to preparing food for 4. When you see it it looks like an absurd amount of condiments and you’re inclined to add less, resulting in a bland meal. And once you’re back to cooking for a normal group of people you’re inclined to add some extra causing everybody tears in their eyes. Cooking on a different scale requires a different approach too.
You need to completely rethink things on a different scale. Oh and the whipped cream for dessert is made with a whisk mounted on an electric drill, using a hand whisk would take forever. I didn’t know that, but learned that as I went along.
The structure of your organization is changing too, isn’t it?
A startup with 10 people needs a totally different organization structure than a multinational with 10.000 people. That sounds so logical. And every step on the road from that startup to that multinational requires new adjustments to the organization structure. Also logical. So why aren’t we doing this in IT? In exactly the same way your IT needs to adjust, with every step your business makes. Where you can get away with a few laptops and with cloud services for a startup, after that phase you need to take control quickly, manage your data and documents and make sure you maintain enough speed in the whole system.
The office network
Organizations with a significant size have an office. Even with the work at home trend you want a place to get together and meet customers. As long as you only have a few people at the office your internet line will work fine. Until the line fills up and everybody is in each others way. Stuttering video calls, faltering cloud services, it gets annoying quickly. You don’t just need more bandwidth with more people, to avoid a bland meal, but mostly you need traffic control. In technical terms that’s called Quality of Service (QoS). It ensures that important traffic that you’re waiting for is let through quickly and doesn’t get forced out by video calls, downloads and such. More people causes more traffic, but also more complex traffic. If you don’t regulate that it quickly becomes a street map of a large city, but without the traffic lights.
That one WiFi access point will also become a a whole bunch, and that requires a WiFi controller that makes them play nice together. Ever tried putting 50 people on a single access point? It’s great for teaching your employees patience.
Your storage suddenly needs structure too
Delivering the data to a lot of employees require to do their work takes a completely different approach than if it’s only for a few employees. Otherwise it gets to be so slow that they lose work time, and it becomes difficult to find everything back.
Onedrive and DropBox are great for sharing files. But not when you grow to dozens or hundreds of employees. How do you make sure everyone has the files they need? And can find them quickly? And who owns the data anyway? How do you keep track of what gets shared with who?
All questions that need answering. You need to structure your data storage. With ‘file shares’. Or something like Sharepoint. But how scalable is the solution you choose? Will it support the next 2 or 3 steps your business makes? Or will the next step require something different yet again?
Your girth is growing too
You don’t just have more data because your business is growing, you’ve also collected more history because your business existed longer. If your company has doubled in twice the time you suddenly have 4 times the data. It picks up volume really fast. And more data needs to be processed differently and searched through differently. Finding a needle in a needle stack is easy if you have 30 needles, time consuming with 300 needles and almost impossible with 3000 needles. Unless the needles are neatly sorted into boxes.
Data complexity also increases, not just the volume of the data. Complex data takes a different approach than simple, flat data.
Are your suppliers scaling up?
Suppliers also build for a certain scale. Some suppliers have an offering for a few different scales but I don’t know any supplier that has an optimal offering regardless of scale. Whether it’s hardware, software or network suppliers they all have an optimal organization size they can serve. Evaluate regularly if your suppliers are still a good fit.
Ensure IT remains a strategic advantage
A moment will come when your IT feels more like cement overshoes than a strategic asset. Cost is only rising and your employees are more hindered than helped by it. Where your business was flying on the wings of IT it’s now become a limiting factor.
That’s the moment you get help. Someone that can help you adjust the scale of your IT so it fits your organization scale again. Someone that gives you the numbers that tell you where you are and where you need to go.
Book a 15 minute Zoom call with me and you’ll know how to readjust the scale of your IT to the scale of your company. So IT transforms from a burden to a joy again.