The Productivity of Quebec enterprises – obstacles to originality

See AMP Version

Managing growth while successfully controlling your expenses, retaining your critical resources and facing competition; and simultaneously increasing profit margin, of course, to please shareholders!  Well, it’s not an easy business to be a manager these days. And very few can boast being a visionary one!

One of the key factors of success is certainly productivity, or  the ability to  increase productivity!  And this, nowadays more than ever, goes through technology.

Technology, you really got me now!

And here’s the dilemma facing the vast majority of managers, the technology of most of their enterprise’s business applications is obsolete but it has been accepted long ago as a necessary pain (for example, Visual FoxPro which can only turn on Windows XP…) since many of these applications have become so essential to their operations and run critical business processes. And more than a few enterprises perpetuate and maintain this situation simply because it’s acceptable, and profitable still… for the moment.

You start suffering from your applications’ technological obsolescence the day it prevents you from developing new and more evolved technology tools because you’re so far behind. Evolving would just eat up most of your operational budget.

Thus, you stick to your old technologies which still contribute and very much so to your profitability instead of investing in creating added-value for the enterprise through the development of new applications dedicated to BI, Mobility, enhancing your business process performance, etc.

But the thing is you do have, better soon than later, to get your applications to evolve in phase with technology  originality or risk missing on the new possibilities / opportunities they bring along and which the manager becomes aware of the benefits mostly only through a case study or an implementation analysis.

Obstacles to originality

Here’s a reminder list of traps to avoid and which constitute as many obstacles to originality among your enterprise. So, you didn’t invest in your applications’ evolution:

  • Your technology has stopped evolving because your IT supplier has decided to move on another platform, just simply; but you, you didn’t make the move with him!!!
  • You have only invested into maintaining your applications but not enough to get them evolving; which is much cheaper and doesn’t attack your profitability… nevertheless, you may find yourself facing a technological (and budgetary) abyss when the time comes to jump start on Mobility, BI, Performance, etc.
  • The fear very often disproportioned of a security breach (IT just doesn’t want anybody accessing data or systems without going through a triple authentication procedure) chokes any will of intuitive or spontaneous technology originality among your enterprise and it transforms even simple 50K $ technology project into a formidable 150K $ analysis; which then is very often sacrificed at the security altar.
  • Your enterprise suffers from the Charbonneau Commission syndrome; the most harmless communication with the exterior has become officialised. Any request or project must now go through an official procedure. It kills any form of initiative in terms of creativity or originality from employees and suppliers.

Conclusion

We have to admit that repeated bad performances from ITs over the last decade in terms of meeting objectives. It is no stranger to the fact that most Managers today would prefer to go with commercial products when it comes to technology instead of investing in the development. A tailor-made technology applications which could prove far better in terms of ROI and Productivity. But it would represent such a high risk for both the enterprise… and the Manager career!

Thus, as for Managers, this inherited frame of mind kills any will of moving towards tailor-made applications even though it could provide some gains or even maybe a major advantage in facing the competition…

So, ask yourself the question: ” in the actual market, is there one commercial product that really meets all my objectives in terms of technology originality and could replace my technological tools or shall I give serious thoughts to the impact of gains and benefits that a perfectly adapted and evolutionary tailor-made technology application would provide? ”

 

Good weekend,

Denis Paul & Michel

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *