Technology Assessments

Technology Assessments should become common practice with all companies. They address issues, identify future problems, discover obsolete software/hardware and save organizations money by addressing efficiency and best practices. Overall they look at People, Process and Technology. Beyond this they become a measuring stick comparing the technology with best practices and with itself. No two Technology Assessments are ever the same, the client will flavor the assessment based upon a specific need or condition. Doing an inventory will address a problem before it happens.

Many Technology Assessments are performed at the eleventh hour when conditions have deteriorated to an advanced state. If the assessments were done sooner, than the condition(s) could have been corrected.

Why aren’t Technology Assessments done on a more regular basis? Probably because of ego or people don’t want an honest review of their environment.

The role of Technology Assessments is not to assign blame but to do a complete audit so everyone knows what’s working and what’s not working. It can be compared to car maintenance, if you don’t fix the problem sooner, the problem will only get bigger.

eRichards Consulting has done more than 50 Technology Assessments, they have ranged from total evaluations of an IT department, evaluation of applications, hardware, process, security, Data Recovery to evaluating companies recently acquired.

Recently we worked with a client whose SAP instance went down, everything was affected. If they had a Technology Assessment done – that would have been prevented. When you have a Ferrari in the garage, do you need special procedures for it? Of course you do, technology does wonderful things for companies but it has to be administered, developed and maintained like any other critical area of a company.