A medium sized business is traditionally defined as having 100 to 500 employees. A lot changes when a business enters this phase in its growth, including the maturity of many different aspects of the business. Marketing, Sales, and Management must all be flexible as the business grows.
A business that is moving out of a ’small business’ stage and into its awkward ‘teenage’ years as a ‘mid-sized’ business is certain to experience difficult growth pains. Nobody, no department, and no project is immune to the pains that are felt by a growing organization. IT always receives the brunt of the ill effects, and must deal with many problems and initiatives related to the expansion. They must review software, hardware, transitioning to new platforms, enterprise expansion and connectivity between systems.
Information technology managers are responsible for a plethora of tasks, from selecting HR software like PeopleSoft to reviewing database systems for managing the enterprises data. They are responsible for reviewing, tracking, and managing all of the tasks that are being undertaken to deal with the growth pains. A lot of work goes into this effort. They must select new software, determine how to run it and run perform hardware procurement and many other tasks.
While analyzing software it is also important to review with the vendor how they handle migrating your existing systems into the new one. The best case scenario is that they have a built-in import tool, but often times we aren’t so lucky. Other times, manual loads or XML data feeds must be used while plugging holes so that you can get your existing data into the new system.
While moving to this mid-sized it is important that the organization also make a concerted effort to value its data. Data is the lifeblood of an organization and provides so many opportunities if it is clean and error-free. From statistical analysis to data mining and developing future projections, if you have good data, the opportunities are endless. Many organizations are implementing data governance and master data management to put tight business rules and controls around there most important data. Doing these programs brings value to the organization and prevents embarrassing mistakes.
In a perfect world, a company would be thinking about scalability and enterprise style systems from employee number 1. The reality, however, is that growth, growth, and growth are the main focus for most companies, and systems are an afterthought. Either way, minimizing the pains of a growing organization is a difficult but rewarding proposition.
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