The benefits of increased ICT investment for businesses
If its digital, its ICT, and in an increasingly digital-first era, ICT investment should be every company’s top priority. The benefits cannot be overstated, and the razor edge granted to companies by automation, virtualization, and digitization puts them ahead of some serious curves in the world of business.
Information communication technology refers to basically everything that takes place in the digital sphere, which, nowadays, is basically everything aside from coffee breaks.
So why should business be investing in ICT as if their lives depended on it? The answer, because it does.
A major time saver
Automating business processes today is the equivalent of upgrading from wooden tools to iron tools in Minecraft. The speed, efficiency, cost saving effects are hard to ignore. Besides the basics, like employee leave requests, customer support, and opening of new accounts, business process automation can save companies time, and therefore money, in ways previously reserved for humans only.
IT support, auditing, contract management, and even employee analytics and retention are processes that can be automated and made quicker and simpler.
Nevertheless, as seen with the incident with Amazon employees getting fired by the AI without human assessment, the human touch is most definitely needed.
Cutting costs
Time is money, yes, but money itself is also money.
There is a causal relationship between the extent of ICT investment by country, and that country’s place in the global economic hierarchy. China, the US, Japan, South Korea, Germany, and the list goes on.
ICT investment within individual businesses is a microcosm to the greater trend, with the exact same results.
Cloud migration is perhaps the best example of a great ICT investment in the right place. It has the potential to save companies heaps of yearly costs in hardware upgrades and maintenance. servers, operating systems, network, and storage, all can be accesses with an internet connection, with the price of the infrastructure scalable with the company’s needs.
Furthermore, using such technologies in day-to-day operations enables an enterprise to channel the most powerful resource of the 21st century –
Data, Data, Data
The significance of harnessing the endless streams of data in, out and around any business cannot be overstated. The insights derived from the day-to-day tools used in company operations and data gathered from business dealings over time can guide a company’s decision making into a brighter, and much more profitable future.
It is for this reason that people wish that governments would dive into ICT investment in the same way that private companies do. Talk about a Utopian ideal. Although with the emergence of RegTech adoption, governments around the world may well grow a few digital brain cells.