The Growing Pains of a new Mid Sized Company

Traditionally, Mid-sized companies have been defined as having anywhere between one hundred and five hundred employees. When a company moves from having just a handful of employees to something of this size, all aspects of the business are forced to grow. Whether it is the sales pipeline or the marketing programs, flexibility is key to growing successfully. by JamesonRothbie Traditionally, Mid-sized companies have been defined as having anywhere between one hundred and five hundred employees. When a company moves from having just a handful of employees to something of this size, all aspects of the business are forced to grow. Whether it is the sales pipeline or the marketing programs, flexibility is key to growing successfully. When an organization moves from being a small-business to a mid-sized business, pains from this growth are certain. No groups or departments are immune to feeling the effects, and IT is almost always impacted severely. IT has to focus on hardware, software, growth initiatives, software analysis and vendor selection, scalability, and moving to enterprise systems that all talk to each other. The job is not easy. It is important that IT management document and prioritize all of the many initiatives it will be undertaking. The IT Managers take on an increasingly larger number of tasks as the organizations expansion occurs. IT tends to get their hands into everything, from Customer Relationship Management systems to Marketing programs - they are there through every step of the way. IT works on reviewing different software options and vendors, analyzing what platform and databases to run the new software on, and how to manage the implementation of this whole new system. Each department likely has its own software that it relies on, and IT is involved every step of the way in each. 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. As an organization grows, it also becomes much more important to have reliable data. If the volume of data is growing rapidly, this can seem like an impossible task. A recent initiative by small, medium, and large companies alike is to implement master data management and data governance. These two programs combined work to identify the most critical data to the organization and institute controls and business rules to ensure that it is accurate and reliable. Data that is known to be clean and reliable is helpful in marketing, sales, and also in ensuring future growth. Good data can be used for financial and growth projects as well as estimates. While it would be great if, from day one, the company founder put controls around data and used enterprise level system, that is usually not how it plays out. More likely, data was stored in Access, Excel, and on little sheets of paper. Some work was outsourced, others done in house, and all was saved in different ways. Bringing this all together and making it work is critical to success, and it falls on the IT managers to make this happen. About the Author: Learning Master Data Management can be difficult. The eZine Article helps to break it down to the bare essentials.

 

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