Business and IT alignment has been an important consideration for businesses for more than 30 years. With a rapid pace of technological innovation, businesses are tasked with determining how to best leverage opportunities to improve the alignment of technology with business to achieve success. While research suggests a strong correlation between alignment maturity and an organization’s performance, the benefits need not be exclusively available to large enterprises that have access to the resources to invest in business technology. Business management applications designed and priced with small to midsized businesses in mind are driving the trend forward.
There are a number of reasons for which SMEs strive for alignment between IT and their business operation such as; automating manual processes to free up time to grow their business, accessing information from across their business processes to inform business decisions in addition to building and maintaining customer relationships. Take for example IT Solutions provider Virtual Graffiti Inc; as a fast-growing business on the prestigious Inc.5000 list, it needed to align its business with a technology solution that would not only run its business better, but also help improve the customer experience.
Vision33’s Virtual Graffiti customer success story highlights how the company was able to align its business processes with ERP software to enable the automation of sales processes so that it can focus on its core competencies; providing exceptional IT solutions to its customer base. With SAP Business One, Virtual Graffiti has much better control and visibility across its entire business; filling in the information gap that had delayed customer order fulfillment in the past. This helps manage relationships with prospects and customers, resulting in an improvement in customer satisfaction.
The importance of businesses leveraging technology to create an exceptional customer experience is furthered by both president and CEO of Virtual Graffiti and Vision33’s own Carl Lewis, manager of Vision33’s TOTAL Care customer service program. During their appearance on the SAP Coffee Break with Game Changers, each gave a perspective on the topic that creating an exceptional customer experience can provide small to midsized businesses with a sustainable competitive advantage and enable them to maintain success against larger competitors that take advantage of their economies of scale.
While business and technology alignment is a trend that will likely remain important well into the future, technology alone does not drive business success in isolation. Next time, we will discuss how businesses without an IT department or IT skills can maximize the benefit achieved from leveraging business technology with a certified ERP implementation partner.
