IT (Information Technology) can serve as a catalyst for business transformation. An IT system can enable employees, customers, and partners to work together to consistently deliver customer value. It should support business processes and information needs.

However, the IT system must be flexible so that it can quickly respond to changing customer needs and business challenges. This type of IT system must be designed so that various pieces can be changed without changing the overall feel and experience of interfacing with the IT. The customers, employees and partners must always feel that the interface is enhanced or simpler – or even intuitive – rather than more complex and frustrating.

This means constantly evaluation and upgrading all or part of your IT system. Because changing the entire IT system is very costly and time consuming and because there often is no single IT system that aligns perfectly with the processes and goals of a company, more and more companies are looking to implement pieces and parts of various systems. While this sounds like a good idea, it often turns into a nightmare. The various pieces and parts have differing platforms, differing interfaces, and no way to interface with each other. It may even be that the companies that sold and installed these various pieces promised they would ‘work together.’ But now you are not sure what was meant by that.

Let’s look at a common example: a customer orders a product. The order desk software logs all kinds of information about the customer. The product is shipped.

A few weeks later, the same customer calls to ask a question about operating the product. The help desk person, however, has no access to the order desk information – or the online order information – and must ask the customer much of the same information as well as critical information about the product in order to determine which product engineer should handle the call. (The customer finds this frustrating and wasteful of his time.)

The call is then transferred to the product engineer who must ask many of the same questions again because he cannot access the information from the order desk software or the help desk software. He may then have to log onto a separate computer or computer system to access information about the product to answer the question.

Is this the experience you want your customers to have? How many hours should they waste giving their name and address over and over, waiting on ‘hold’ and then repeating their explanation and question?

Yet it is difficult to build an IT system that works seamlessly from one part of the company to another, that interfaces flawlessly with the other pieces. Only when you start looking at modular IT systems can you begin to build this type of performance.

Modular IT systems allow your company to constantly evolve to respond to changing needs. They provide upgrades to your existing system. They allow you to have the savings of only changing the part that needs changing at the time it needs changing – and in the way it needs changing. If purchased to do so, they work from the same platform and interface with each other seamlessly. This gives you lower IT costs while optimizing all aspects of your IT system.