Have you ever wondered why modern successful companies spend colossal amounts of money on IT infrastructure and systems? Can IT Really help you develop a scalable business? Can your business really benefit and grow from IT? Or is just another fad promising much but delivering no return on investment.

Some of the common complaints you hear when it comes to IT are things like: “We’ve been running this software but it’s never really helped us or it just ended up being a huge waste of money” or “We have a website but it’s never really done anything for us”.

The common misconception is that IT, is a silver bullet and by buying or implementing a certain, the all your business problems will magically disappear. That is the equivalent of expecting to lose weight just by paying for the gym or expecting to become a professional football just by buying boots.

IT is a tool and a good one at that. But like any other tool it requires knowledge of the domain in which the tool is meant to be used. A tool can only enhance or optimize the delivery of results based on

IT stands for: Information Technology. We have all heard the sayings “We live in the information age” or “Information is the new gold”, etc. Let’s take a brief look at how Information can impact the quality of your business.

Bill Gates in his book “Business at the speed of thought”, talks about a digital nervous system analogous to the nervous system of a human being, as a means for companies to obtain information as quickly as possible in order to make decisions in reaction to threats and opportunities in the business surroundings.

Business, like life, believe it or not comes down to only two things: 1) Decisions 2) The corresponding actions based on those decisions. Business is comprised of a series of decisions and every decision you make and the corresponding actions you will take in your business will determine whether your business will be a success or a flop. Allow me to elaborate. Let’s say that I gave you a large some of money to start a business, what would you do? What kind of business would you start and why? Where would set up shop? What would you sell? Where would you buy your stock? Who would you sell to? How much would you sell your goods?

It’s clear to see that success or failure of the business would hinges on getting those decisions right. You could easily end up setting up your business in the inconvenient location, or buying from the goods that are too expensive, or overpricing your goods and so on and so forth. All these wrong decisions could be fatal for your venture and could even lead to serious losses. Without the right INFORMATION at the time of setting up the business (the right time), all you are left with are guesses, sometimes educated guesses at best but guesses nonetheless.

The more your decisions are based on fact, the higher your chances of your business succeeding. Imagine, setting up your business at the right location, buying goods at the right price and selling them to the right customers at a price that they find convenient. Sounds too good to be true right? With the right information, at the right time, this does not have to be far-fetched. You would be removing the guesswork from your success and making your results predictable. Remember, making random decisions will only give you random results. In order to succeed on purpose, your results should have a level of predictability. This can only be achieved by making informed business decisions based on facts

That concludes our first part of this series, “Information - The key to building scalable businesses”. In the next part of this series we will look at STATEGY, the foundation of any solid business, and look at practical examples of how Information can help shape, understand, communicate and most importantly execute strategy.