IT System Wellbeing with RIPPLE

Our IT networks and systems are our means of communicating with our employers and employees, supply chains and customers and our means for capturing, storing, and retrieving information and data and a tool for reporting and data analysis. 

There are 5 basic components to an IT infrastructure, hardware, software, network, database, and people. 

For our systems to deliver on their purpose of creating opportunities for innovation, productivity efficiencies, growth, and development we need to be sure to have all 5 components performing optimally and in unison. 

There are numerous issues we experience with our IT infrastructures and here are some of the most commonplace ones. 

It is commonplace for businesses to:

• make disjointed IT purchasing decisions especially when there are multiple purchasers with different needs and priorities and as staff come and go

• create workarounds perpetuating and exacerbating inefficiencies

• tolerate data inaccuracies

• operate poor and compromised security practices

• neglect data storage protocols

• fail to upgrade and keep systems current and effective

• rely on the amateur expertise of employees

• inadequately train users resulting in ‘garbage in, garbage out’

• underutilise free resources.  These commonplace happenings all compromise the very purpose of our systems costing our businesses, a significant amount of monetary loss and unrecoverable time. 

IT is an essential component of our businesses, and we have many options available to us and for every question we have there can be multiple answers all sounding as viable and legitimate as the next.  It is vital that our systems be considered as both interrelated and interdependent and we must understand that every addition and extraction from them will have an effect whether it is immediately identifiable or not.

Engaging an IT specialist to conduct a system analysis will prove cost effective and probably quite liberating and you may be surprised how your existing components can be tweaked and deployed differently to bring about relatively low investment upgrades.