By Marcel den Hartog, special to Overdrive

If you have an existing company, large or small, you rely on  Information Technology (IT). For small businesses,  you rely on your website to generate more business or a small office network that you use to send reminders, do internet banking and create price quotes.

If you’re a larger company, you probably do all of the above, but with more hardware, and you also likely run some professional applications to do your financials, inventory, planning, etc. Add an internet connection that you expect to be up 100% of the time, backups that you’re supposed to make every day and antivirus software that you need to keep up to date, and we’re already talking about a lot of investments.

I have personally seen many small- to mid-sized companies whose owners and top executives are not aware how much their company relies on IT. It is often left to some IT-savvy people in the organization to keep things going, and only when large investments need to be made, or when things go terribly wrong, do the top level get involved.

It’s strange, because they are often very involved with everything else that goes on in their business. And like other things in their business, IT needs a bit of TLC to make sure it is used in the most optimal and efficient way. After all, every dollar spent on IT could be spent on other things that could make the business more profitable and/or competitive.

Like every other resource that is needed to run the organization,  IT needs some real attention every year or so. Only then, and armed with some basic, but very important, knowledge, will you be able to get the most out of your IT investments. So here are some ground rules for every entrepreneur:

1. Know how much you are currently spending. This sounds simple, but it’s not. Many people don’t really know how much they’re spending on software, subscriptions and maintenance contracts, or how much longer their server(s) will be able to do the job. The hidden costs are especially important. There really is no industry data on how much a company should spend on IT, but an your first job is to know how much it costs you today.
2. Know what you want. Apart from the basics, like a website that informs potential customers about your business and software, you need to make professional-looking quotes for potential customers, and internet access, you probably have plenty of hardware and software that makes your life a lot simpler. Figure out what other functionality would make your life easier, talk to your peers and read a magazine specific to your industry.
3. Figure out how much you want to spend. Again, no easy task. Are you using IT just to work more efficiently, or do you really see it as a strategic tool that helps you to generate more revenue? And if you have figured out how much you are already spending, plus the cost of everything you hope to buy, it may be more expensive than you originally had in mind.
4. Make a plan. Of all four steps, this is the one where the optimization really kicks in. And this is where you will need help from a non-biased, well-informed and reliable partner. Why? Because whatever you do, everybody will know better. A simple example: Imagine you find out that running your applications in the cloud can save you money. The person or company who is now taking care of your IT will probably not like this and he/she will come up with some very good reasons why you should keep your existing infrastructure.

Marcel den Hartog is principal product marketing EMEA for CA Technologies Mainframe solutions. In this role, he is a frequent speaker on both internal (customer) and external events, where he talks about CA Technologies mainframe strategy, vision and market trends.