HOUSTON BUSINESS REVIEW

COST-EFFECTIVE IT: Designing the System
By Richard Sonnier

Houston Business Show Commentator Richard Sonnier, of the Information Technology Services firm Nimble Services, provides weekly information on our show about information technology issues. Mr. Sonnier can be reached at 281.445.4800 x 250 or via email.

Last week, I discussed how to identify opportunities for IT automation. This week I will focus on the second step of saving money with IT: designing a system or method to automate these repetitive processes.

System Design

With your target business process identified, you need to map the process onto IT system. This is where many IT projects go wrong for two reasons:

1. Poor understanding of the target business process.
2. Technology hype.

Poor Understanding of the Target Business Process

Human beings are amazing. We have a great capacity to take general instructions and deliver specific results handling all the little details. Details are the killer in IT automation. For example, consider the simple process of sending an invoice. The accounting staff might describe this process as follows:

1. Create the invoice.
2. Print the invoice.
3. Mail the invoice.

This is very simple, right. Now, we want to automate this process so we just need a computer system to automate these three steps. The problem is how. When the accounting staff says, "create the invoice," they know what that means in detail. To automate that step we must design all that detail into the IT system. You must define how to create the invoice. In the system design, this one simple step becomes many steps, for example:

• Process Step: Create the invoice,
• Look up the customer's address and other information.
• If a new customer, enter all the customer information.
• Save the new customer's information.
• Determine the next sequential, unique invoice number.
• Assign this invoice number to the customer.
• Look up line item information.
• If a new item, enter all the item information: pricing etc.
• Save the new item's information.
• Insert the item information on the invoice.
• Enter item quantity on the invoice.
• Apply item specific, customer discounts.
• Compute the line item total.
• Compute invoice subtotal.
• Apply overall customer discounts or previous account balance.
• Compute amount due.
• Save invoice.

The system design must breakdown the high level steps into more and more detail steps. You must continue to refine and breakdown the steps until you have the process completely defined and all the data elements identified. The detailed steps together with the definition of the data elements is the system design. You have a good system design if you can handle the written description to a high school student, and the student can carry out the process. Armed with the system design, the appropriate IT hardware and software can be identified.

Technology Hype

"Just buy our package, it does it all" is the mantra of most IT vendors. Buying a package before you complete the system design and know the process in detail does not work. I wish it did. Often, you can buy a good partial solution once you have a system design.

Once you have designed the solution, you need to obtain the IT hardware and software, which is next week's topic.