Acquisition time!

This morning the company I work for bought its 5th company in the last 3 years taking our total headcount to around 350 and firmly pushing us into the middle of SME. In that time it has diversified from a single product offering of a document management system to 6 (maybe 7 now) main products and pure on-line businesses. The recent purchase is another one of diversification which takes us into the pharmaceutical and oil/gas market; which is somewhere we have never been before!
This is a big change for us not least because of the different requirements from these new customers and their expectations of their suppliers but also simple things like terminology and ethos.

It used to be that our IT department was closely aligned to the business’ products and were able to deliver those products internally through a close understanding of their development. More recently, however, we have only been able to deliver frameworks in which the business units themselves can deliver those products.
Largely the reason for this is the business rate of change. With that much increase in product and that many different markets it is difficult to see how we could understand each of the products particular foibles to the point we can provide effective consultancy on them. So instead our role becomes one of a generic back office role trying to support those individuals who can deliver each of the software components.

The more the company diversifies the more we become generic and I can’t help but feel that our IT department is turning into an internal outsourced unit where we provide services to the business as a whole and then set SLAs for them to work against. Our role becomes focused on trying to provide a flexible, affordable and resilient infrastructure to feed business units increasingly hungry for more resource.

I have been promoting the idea of a “brand” for IT internally for sometime now, trying to show everyone what we do and allow them to see the performance of our systems and rate our level of work. I quite like the idea of making us even more of an internal outsourcing dept but can’t help but think it is exposing us to a large risk of being outsourced ourselves!

So here we are and we have a choice to make. The business as a whole is changing quickly (as it has to) and we need to change with it. We might expose ourselves to risk but show me a role that is ever secure! By providing a quality and open service it might quicken the road to our departure but equally it might also give others confidence in what we do and appreciate the value we add to their business unit and the group as a whole.