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Simon Hurst's practice IT casebook: People issues

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21st Jun 2006
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Technology is a vital element of almost every accountancy practice. Using the right IT effectively can not only bring about efficiency and cost savings, but can also define the quality of the service that you provide to your clients. This series of short case studies looks at how particular practices have benefited or suffered from IT and suggests practical ways in which you can improve your own IT performance.

The singer not the song
If there was a single issue that differentiates good IT practice from bad it would not be a technological issue at all, but rather the importance of considering people.

Pretty much the worst IT situations I have come across have resulted from the imposition of IT systems on people who feel themselves alienated by the entire evaluation and implementation process ' that is, if there is an implementation process. The early 1990s when businesses started to replace DOS-based Word Perfect 5.1 with Microsoft Word provided some textbook examples of what NOT to do. Some professional firms treated the changeover with as much consideration and pre-planning as buying a new office kettle - in fact possibly less.

In one firm, secretarial staff who had used keyboards and screens to operate a piece of software for hours each day for more than five years, came in one day and were expected to cope with an alien computer with a strange mouse thing and word processing software that worked in a fundamentally different way. This approach inevitably led to a dramatic decline in productivity and quality of output, and in some cases a lot of distraught sobbing. The lesson of this shameful episode is that people determine the success of IT projects, not technology.

More recently I worked with a firm of accountants who had the good sense not only to include an independent consultant in their evaluation process for a new practice management solution, but also to ensure that the people who would be most affected by the change were also represented in the evaluation team. This makes sense for several reasons. If staff members are involved in the choice of system, they will have far more of an interest in making it a success.

Important as the outputs of any computer system are, it is also vital that the system copes adequately with all the input requirements and is easy to use. The best people to judge this aspect of a system are likely to be those who will be most involved in its daily use. They will also have in-depth knowledge of the good and bad points of any existing system and will be able to identify practical advantages and disadvantages of a potential replacement.

Don't stop there
Obviously the people issues of a new computer system don't end with its selection. The key determinant of success is unlikely to be how good or bad the solution you have chosen is, but rather how well you use the system. This in turn will depend on your implementation and training process.

It is a sad reflection on this aspect of IT projects that many suppliers feel it necessary to include compulsory training as part of any package. Training and implementation costs are the last part of the IT budget that should be sacrificed not, as often happens, the first.

You can choose the best system in the world but it will be a complete waste of money if, in the evaluation process, you've alienated those who are going to use it, and you then compound the error by allocating insufficient time and resource to implementing it and making sure that people are trained to use it properly.

About the author
Simon Hurst is a former chairman of the ICAEW IT Faculty and runs The Knowledge Base, a consultancy dedicated to helping practitioners make effective use of technology. He is also the author of AccountingWEB's Office ProductivITy Kit and '100 Time-saving Tips for Microsoft Office'. For more information, visit The Knowledge Base website. AccountingWEB members can also access his back catalogue and IT Clinic online email support via the Office ProductivITy service.

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