Traditionally, Mid-sized companies have been defined as having anywhere between one hundred and five hundred employees. When a company moves from having just a handful of employees to something of this size, all aspects of the business are forced to grow. Whether it is the sales pipeline or the marketing programs, flexibility is key to growing successfully.
When an organization moves from being a small-business to a mid-sized business, pains from this growth are certain. No groups or departments are immune to feeling the effects, and IT is almost always impacted severely. IT has to focus on hardware, software, growth initiatives, software analysis and vendor selection, scalability, and moving to enterprise systems that all talk to each other. The job is not easy. It is important that IT management document and prioritize all of the many initiatives it will be undertaking.
The IT Managers take on an increasingly larger number of tasks as the organizations expansion occurs. IT tends to get their hands into everything, from Customer Relationship Management systems to Marketing programs – they are there through every step of the way. IT works on reviewing different software options and vendors, analyzing what platform and databases to run the new software on, and how to manage the implementation of this whole new system. Each department likely has its own software that it relies on, and IT is involved every step of the way in each.
While analyzing software it is also important to review with the vendor how they handle migrating your existing systems into the new one. The best case scenario is that they have a built-in import tool, but often times we aren’t so lucky. Other times, manual loads or XML data feeds must be used while plugging holes so that you can get your existing data into the new system.
While moving to this mid-sized it is important that the organization also make a concerted effort to value its data. Data is the lifeblood of an organization and provides so many opportunities if it is clean and error-free. From statistical analysis to data mining and developing future projections, if you have good data, the opportunities are endless. Many organizations are implementing data governance and master data management to put tight business rules and controls around there most important data. Doing these programs brings value to the organization and prevents embarrassing mistakes.
In a perfect world, a company would be thinking about scalability and enterprise style systems from employee number 1. The reality, however, is that growth, growth, and growth are the main focus for most companies, and systems are an afterthought. Either way, minimizing the pains of a growing organization is a difficult but rewarding proposition.