In the corporate world technology/IT in general is usually viewed as a supplementary and less critical function that is in many cases grossly under managed and/or poorly funded in comparison. I find this somewhat funny when either the corporation is an IT/Technology supplier or relies heavily on technology to keep its business and its core operations running.
For example, in an IT service company, sales is very important (no doubt) because without sales there is no business, however when its unimportant for sales to understand the technology they are pushing and there is a large disconnect between the sales team and the technology teams problems can arise further down the track, specially during implementation phases of the project. This in turn can have a very detrimental effect on the IT provider and on gaining future business should the technology sold not align with the technology delivered.
Banks are also a prime example of where technology may not be the prime focus of the top level executives however without technology almost all functions of the bank will grind to a halt. This in turn can cause serious problems for business operations that will eventually be escalated to everyones attention. In investment banking, computer systems running important mathematical functions that determine buy and sell orders account for a large portion of trades and profits, keeping these systems running smoothly is paramount to how the bank looks at the end of its financial year !
In retail banking a blunder in Technology/IT can cause customers to not get paid resulting in mass havoc within the community. An event such as this occurred late last year, when an Australian retail bank had a big problem with their payment system that delayed transactions for almost 1 week. Blunders in IT/technology sensitive industries such as the airlines industry can also result in massive delays and complete customer dissatisfaction. When IT is functioning correctly everyone forgets the kind of effort needed to keep things running so that the business core functions can continue to bring in the revenue, when IT malfunctions it makes the headline news and hits the corporation hard.
So why am I getting into all of this, you may ask ?! Well the reason is, our core business is to provide a way for businesses to connect their best deals whether they be services or products to the consumers. In phase 2 this is not so apparent but in phase 3 and 4 our goal and aim to do this will become very much clear. Our goal from the consumer end is to ensure that looking for items is quick and easy with as minimal pain and overhead as possible.
With this in mind even though we aren’t selling an operating system, or a software package, for us to deliver on providing the best service that we can to the user we must capitalise on technology and also focus on ensuring the technology implemented is best suited for the task. The goal is to ensure all modules run smoothly and all user actions are as easy to use and as FAST as possible. We need to combine great use of technology and also address user feedback appropriately. This means that even though our core business is to deliver deals from the business to the consumer we can not treat technology as a division of lesser importance.
In our view technology is paramount to deliver our core business promises and as a result technology and IT will always be regarded as an important aspect of our business to ensure ULTIMATELY customer satisfaction.