For small businesses, IT work is just a subset of everyday tasks that pretty much anyone in the company can take care of. Email, data transfer, internal database structure, spreadsheet information, etc, can all be taken care of on a case by case basis.
However, once a certain threshold is reached, it’s important to get a certain degree of specialization when it comes to your IT work, as it will quickly become a full time job to keep records and processes organized. So, specifically, what are five reasons to organize your company’s IT data?
It Makes Portfolio Analysis Easier
If you have more than more project happening at the same time, you need a way to track project resources in a way that makes sense. There are plenty of examples of project and portfolio software that can help you do this, but at the heart of every one of those installations is going to be the organizational core. This core may be automatic eventually, but it does take a certain amount of effort even to set up the original threshing process.
It Prevents Data Loss
Organizing your company’s IT will also prevent data loss. If you install some type of backup system as part of your ongoing IT scheduling, then no matter what happens, you’ll have easy access to everything that your company needs to continue operating. It may take some time to reset everything to normal, but at least you won’t lose any business in the process, because everything will be organized and stored offsite.
It Helps People Learn What IT Is For
Also, if you have a company wide policy for organizing IT, then every member of your company will at least have some idea of the importance of it. For example, if everyone in the company learns password best practices, then the IT department will have significantly less work when it comes to maintaining any kind of stop loss for security threats.
It Gives a Path of Data To Show Shareholders and Managers
Another reason to organize IT data is so that you can show it to company shareholders and managers. The raw data itself may be completely abstract, but by organizing it accordingly, a few nice charts and graphs should be all you need to convince folks that you’re on the right business path.
It Allows You To Remain Efficient and Scalable
Finally, organized IT data means efficiency, and that leads to the ability to scale your processes quickly. If you suddenly get a large order in, or have a large demand for something, with disorganized IT, you could be losing potential clients by the second in some cases, so definitely better to be safe than sorry!