The costs of not integrating quality management with business systems revolve around lost opportunities to streamline IT’s capabilities. A fully integrated quality management solution affords you the benefit of enabling your organization to balance the cost of quality holistically and dynamically. The problem is that stakeholders in IT may offer some resistance as the limitations of your IT architecture become apparent. In this post we’ll cover some of the potential pitfalls of not integrating quality with other systems.
Understanding IT’s Pain Points is Key to Stakeholder Buy-in
Surely, adding another enterprise application to IT’s heavy workload is not ideal from the perspective of cost-concerned decision makers. The time-to-value of investments in IT parallels the time-to-value of investments in quality management. As such, your mutually beneficial relationship with stakeholders in IT is absolutely critical to making your business case a success. Enterprise software implementations simply take time to get right. Poorly planned software implementations are notorious for raising costs throughout the enterprise.
Further complicating the issue at hand, enterprise IT is in the midst of a fundamental paradigm shift. Today, the order of the day for IT departments is to shepherd companies through the convergence of mobile, cloud, and IT consumerization. Big Data only adds to IT’s conundrum, too. In the manufacturing industry, the influx of high volume, incredibly varied data has forced the hand of IT departments to seek cost-cutting solutions. IT must find ways to collect, store, and analyze enormous data sets in the most cost-effective way, and too often, these pain points create friction between cross-functional quality management processes.
The real costs associated with manufacturers’ inability to decide on improved quality management directly relate to increased operating and maintenance costs in IT. The old paradigm of simply adding more computing and software resources to enterprise IT architecture has been called into question as the costs are simply too high to maintain over the long term. A full “rip-and-replace” scenario is certainly not feasible from a cost perspective, and organizational gridlock only adds to the cost of implementing new technology and software in the enterprise. The initial cost of implementing an integrated quality management solution pays your company back via savings in the cost of poor quality. To break the gridlock, you need to communicate this reality to stakeholders in IT to justify the implementation efforts.
Fostering a Sound Collaboration Between IT and Quality Management
IT spends a significant portion of its budget simply maintaining the infrastructure and software already in place throughout the enterprise. These costs are real. To ease the gridlock between your department and stakeholders in IT, you must foster a sound, collaborative culture around quality.
Delaying the decision on improved quality management solutions only allows inefficiencies in your current IT architecture to persist, thus devouring the cost savings of investments made in the cost of good quality. You should know that it is in IT’s best interest to heed your recommendations for an integrated software solution because integrated processes lower overhead costs. The reality on the front lines of IT may not coexist with the reality of your company’s quality management deficiencies. Sprawling IT systems become expensive to maintain, and from the perspective of stakeholders in IT, you must be able to show that the integrated quality management solution you chose will not add to the burden.
Final Thoughts on Integrating Quality with Business Systems
IT should no longer be an organizational bottleneck when it comes to making the business case for quality management software. The reality is that both quality management and IT can benefit from an integrated software solution to facilitate better workflows and exchange of time-sensitive quality management data. The benefits of software may seem intangible, but to stakeholders in IT, the potential to simplify IT architecture with an integrated solution to bridge gaps between enterprise applications is too great to bypass.
The real costs associated with indecision encroach into the IT domain, which is why easing gridlock between your department and stakeholders in IT is critical to making your business case a success.
