Ergonomics is a science that has been gaining round over the last ten years. It is all about design and literally translated means human factors. In other words it is all about how we fit as human beings in to the work environment. Scientific information about our environment is analysed and the best way for us to use that space is then designed.

Ergonomics is also called biotechnology. Essentially, it is the design of equipment that will lead to the least amount of stress by reducing such things as tiredness and discomfort. This is all very praise worthy of course. However, remember that when workers are alert and awake, then the organization they work for is in its best position to make the workers as productive as possible. So, ergonomics could be said to have benefits to both the bosses and the workers, something rare! However, properly designed equipment, such as chairs and desks, can be expensive, which leads many organizations to overlook or ignore it. However, this also means they may not get the maximum results out of their employees!

The human body has needs, limitations and abilities. Ergonomics takes these in to account and Ergonomists design systems and environments to take account of these factors.

A lot of Ergonomics could well come under the heading “Plain Common Sense”. Take a look at the pictures. Below, Mohamad is sitting in a chair which is obviously broken and beyond its best! However, he is still using it and this could very well cause him back problems now or later in life. The desk, although it is ergonomic, in as much as its height can be changed, is not at a suitable level for the desk and this forces Mohamad to look UP to the screen. Most people will be able to tell that this will probably give him a pain in the neck in an hour or two!

With the introduction of an ergonomically designed chair, Mohamad looks a lot more comfortable! His eyes are now fairly level with the screen, in fact he is looking slightly down at the screen which is the most comfortable way of doing so. The desk and chair are at a good level with each other. Notice how Mohamad's back is now straight and his feet are resting on the ground. He is unlikely to get back ache like this!

Ergonomics is not, of course, restricted just to desks and chairs! This has just been a simple example to give you an idea what ergonomics is all about and how sometimes it can be quite easy to implement. Monitors, chairs and desks should be adjustable. Workers should be encouraged to take time out to stretch and move around - and have plenty of breaks from the PC!

Other factors include ventilation in offices, lighting and noise levels.

Ventilation is important. As warm blooded creatures we work at our hardest when we are neither too hot nor cold. Most organizations will keep the temperature at around 21 degrees as this is the level of heat at which we are most comfortable. Desks are best positioned away from radiators as they will make people far too hot!

Fluorescent lighting is a problem. It flickers and often people say it gives them headaches. It can also cause the computer screen to have a shine on it that makes it difficult to see. Organisation should always try to limit their use of unnatural light - and one easy solution is to work in an office that has plenty of windows. When people can turn off the lights and work in natural light they are at their most comfortable.

Noise! It can get unbearable. Old computers and printers would often be very noisy and people would often leave work with a terrible headache if they were unlucky enough to sit near one! Nowadays, PCs and printers can be bought that are very quiet. However it is not always just machinery that causes noise! The major culprits are people. That is way in most “open plan” offices you will see partitions between desks. This is not only to discourage people talking to each other; it is to muffle the sound going from one desk to another.

So, technostress is here to stay. However, with the sensible use of ergonomics these problems can be alleviated.

Capacity is something everyone tries to increase in their working lives. It means being more productive, doing more things - and hopefully in less time than they previously took to do!

One of the major reasons that organizations adopted ICT - or simply “computers” as it was generally called at the time was that magic word - PROFIT! As time has gone on, most companies, small and large, have increased their ICT capacity. This then allows their employees themselves to increase their own capacity - in other words to increase their productivity. This, to put it bluntly, means to do more work (even though it may not feel like it, but generally it does!).

There were several major factors in the decision to adopt these new fangled computers:

• It would reduce the amount of people needed to work for an organization. Traditionally, wages can take up a huge amount of a company's turnover.
• It would reduce the amount of time needed to perform certain operations. In other words, it was envisaged that more things could be done in less time.
• Less human error would mean that the quality of goods would increase - or at the very least not decline

All this adds up to saving money. Even if an organization's profits did not increase in their own right, by reducing costs in other ways then the overall profit could increase.

This takes great care on behalf of the company (something we will look in to later).

But how does ICT allow an individual WORKER to be more productive?

In parts three and four we looked at a variety of professions that have seen change since the increase of ICT in the workplace. We have seen how the skills needed may have changed since then. How, though, does ICT enable these professionals to increase their capacity. How, then, does it make them more productive?

Teacher/Trainer

Although more time generally goes in to the preparation of what are called Learning Materials, most teachers and trainers will admit (some grudgingly) that ICT has enabled them to be a lot more productive.

Although time must be taken to, for example, produce a lesson or training session that will need an interactive PowerPoint presentation, this can be used again and again. Moreover, if these are shared among other teaching or training colleagues who are themselves producing lessons of this nature then these materials can be disseminated and shared.

Time consuming activities, such as printing up worksheets and assignment are also becoming a thing of the past. Learning materials can be placed on a VLE (see previous parts) for learners to print out at their leisure, or reprint if they have lost their originals.

Software training manuals, which can be updated when the software it describes is updated, can be used to allow learners to work more independently of the teacher or trainer, freeing up time to allow the professional to concentrate a little more on some of the students who may otherwise fall behind.

Designer

In the past, when designs were put on to paper, a single part of the design that had to be changed could mean that the entire design would have to be redrawn from scratch.

Now, with Computer Aided Design, only the part of the design that needs changing has to be changed, with time freed up for the designer and their team to move forward with the project as a whole or begin work on a completely different piece of work.

Administrator

Imagine if an Administrator was asked to write a letter to a thousand people. They would immediately start planning to create a single word processed document, with the main elements of the letter as its contents.

Then, each letter could be “tweaked” - in other words changed slightly to suit each individual recipient. This could be done one by one, which is in itself time consuming - yawn! However, if the Administrator is sufficiently skilled up, they would be aware that a function called Mail Merge exists. This enable one set of information - for example a letter - to be merged with another - in this case it could be the names and addresses of the recipients held in a database.

In the past, if these letters were to be personalized at all they would each have to be typed out individually. Imagine the time that would take!

And there's more! What if the company had thousands of customers, the details of whom were filed away neatly in - uh oh - filing cabinets! The Administrator could be asked to write a letter ONLY to customers over a certain age that lived in a certain area.

Would you like to have been the person who had to dig out all those dusty paper records? Thought not! Now, with a customer database it would be quite straightforward to create a query that would capture this information from the database and use that. Click, drag, click - okay!

So, ICT in general means that people can increase their work capacity.

Think of some of the other jobs that have existed since before computers. Can you think of the advantages that using ICT has brought?

There are - of course - disadvantages too! But that is another story!

Next: Trends in ICT

Help, Here Come the Computers

Most people worried about that but generally their worries would be closer to home. Family, home and jobs were what people worried most about - just like now really! A major worry was jobs and the increasing use in the workplace of a recent interloper - the computer!

Let's face it. Computers and robots do not get tired. They do not need sleep. They do not get bored when they do the same thing over and over again. They don't even go on strike!

In the manufacturing industries, for examples, the production of motor vehicles was becoming mechanized. Robots took over from people in the putting together of cars. Since 1980 the amount of jobs in manufacturing in the UK has halved. A lot of people lost a lot of jobs.

Administrators and secretaries found that they were no longer in such demand because their managers would acquire the skills that had traditionally done by them. The age of “Take a letter, Miss Jones” came to an end in that decade. A lot of people lost a lot of jobs.

In publishing, the old fashioned way of producing pages of a newspaper or magazine - typesetting - which took a long time to learn - were beginning to be phased out. New software packages such as PageMaker and Quark were making traditional methods look old fashioned, time consuming and expensive. A lot of people lost a lot of jobs.

Essentially, as long as machinery (sometimes called robots) and computers cost less than employing a large number of skilled workers then businesses will make every effort to replace them with machines. Are we doomed, like George Jetson in the old cartoon series set in a possible future, The Jetsons, to sit at a disk and push one button again and again all day long?

The Humans Fight Back

As we know now, the revolution in personal computers and robotics in the 1980s was not the end of the world. However, what the work force in general discovered was that as computers evolved then they had to learn to adapt to this continual change.

A lot of people, it is true, discovered that heir skills, gained over a long period of time, were now redundant. In other words, they - and their skills - were not needed anymore. Some people never worked again. However, most people in this situation moved on and discovered new skills which could make them a living. Between 1997 and 2002 alone the amount of jobs in the UK in the technology industry doubled!

Technology has not destroyed jobs and then stood still. After all, it is human needs that push technology - and we all need to work at some point in our lives! ICT created new markets (online shopping is just one example). The whole process is called “creative destruction” by economists. In other words, when something is destroyed then something else comes along to replace it. For almost three decades that is the way the major economies of the world have operated.

ICT, then, does not really destroy jobs. It moves them around. Databases did not completely replace filing; plenty of people still do that. People still have to deliver the post. However, these things are now done in conjunction with technology, not independent of it.

What ICT does mean, though, is that any skills you have today may not be need tomorrow. This of course upsets people, but what they must do is get over it. So, you go on a course to learn something and then find in two years that it has been replaced by something else - then learn that something else!

The focus of an individual's working life in the 21st century must be on training and then, sorry, retraining! Employers too, must understand this and so many progressive organizations now have much more active training programmes than they ever had as they have realized its importance. Of course, the greatest responsibility is on the individual.

Remember the dinosaurs? Their remains were only discovered because people developed new tools to discover them. Use your new tools to see what you can discover - or even become!

NEXT:  Capacity – Increasing Levels of Achievement

The Teacher/Trainer

Chalk and Talk! That is how people used to refer to teaching. The teacher would have a blackboard, some chalk and a board duster. They would then "talk" through what was to be learned - making notes on the blackboard as they progressed through the class. The students would be expected to make notes: after all, once the teacher had used the board duster, then the lesson would effectively be gone forever. The blackboard was replaced by the whiteboard and instead of chalk then pens would be used. However, the theory was still the same.

In the early nineties the concept of the SMART board was introduced to class rooms. This is a screen that is controlled by touch and it works with a computer and a projector. What is input in to the computer can be projected on to the screen and the teacher - or students for that matter - can write on the board with digital pens. The board can also be used to present information using such software as Microsoft PowerPoint.

Many education and training centres also employ what is known as a VLE - a Virtual Learning Environment. This is a tool to manage course rather than teaching itself and is becoming essential for teachers to understand as it makes the administration of a course much easier. The system can show how students are doing and can be tied in with reports that detail their attendance and punctuality. They are often used to help with "distance" learning where the educator and student are separated geographically buy they are increasingly used to supplement one-on-one and group teaching within the classroom.

As the complexity of these systems increases more tools are becoming available for teacher and student alike. Examples include interactive quizzes, discussion boards and chat rooms and wiki spaces which mimic websites such as Facebook.

One advantage of using an electronic system such as a VLE is that classes can retain a permanent reminder. Notes about classes can be posted up on the system and those students who need to revise more or perhaps missed the original class can read and review the information. The information can also be shared around other teaching professionals so that a bank of materials can be created. So, one teacher can create an excellent idea for a class and share it with many others.

Most teachers are not "digital natives" to begin with! In other words, many of them are old enough to have started teaching before ICT had made any impact on education or the classroom. So, many have had to upgrade their skills in order to move with the times and for a huge amount this has meant the acquisition of completely new ICT skills.

However, technology will never replace good teaching as the primary best way to learn!

The Architect

The late eighties saw the introduction of CAD or Computer Aided Design in to the field of Architecture. It was adopted first by technical drafting staff and a short while later by the architects themselves. Previously, designers and architects would work at a draughtboard with hardware. In other words, pencils, rulers, erasers, sharpeners - the tools of the trade! If a major mistake was made with the design of a building it would be very costly to go back and put it right: often it meant starting a design again by scratch.

CAD meant that the architect not only had to be a good architect but had to acquire additional skills. ICT skills are now essential and the architect or designer must be able to communicate their designs using a mouse or another input device such as a digitizer.

The Librarian or Archivist

Libraries used to be about books, books and more books! That is still true, but to a lesser extent. If you go to a library these days you will come across a lot of computers that can be used for a variety of things. Of course, the librarians must now be able to use ICT in order to help the people who wish to use the library.

When someone wanted to borrow a book, what would happen in the past is that the book would be stamped and a note made in the lender's record by hand that they had loaned a book from the library. Now, all of that is usually automated which means that librarians must be able to use that system and so, necessarily, be ICT literate.

Requests and searches for certain books can be done online as well, so that a series of libraries run by an authority does not need to have multiple copies of rarely read books in all of their outlets. Instead, when one is requested it can be ordered online and be sent to the outlet closest to the person who wishes to borrow it. Again, the librarians must have the associated computing skills needed to do this.

The Manager

Twenty or thirty years ago managers would have a lot more staff around to help them out than they do now. A manager would normally have a secretary who would help him or her out with such things as letter writing, filing and general administrative duties that were traditionally time consuming and would not be requisite with a manager's salary.

With the introduction of ICT, tasks could be completed far quicker than in previous years and the need for a lot of support staff lessened. Now, managers are generally expected to compose and write (and send!) their own letters, memos and emails.

Many companies would traditionally train secretaries so that they would know the standards of communications used within the organizations. This would include how letters and reports were to be laid out and the kind of language to be used. Many companies now have documents that describe these systems so that any individual worker can acquire this knowledge and use it. This is often known as an "in house" style.

Managers must generally be much more ICT literate and aware than even ten years ago. Skills that may have been taught to a typist or secretary would now be expected of a manager as well.

NEXT: Complexity - More jobs

Why? It is because ICT demands that people have a broader level of intellectual skills than ever before. The reasons for that are historical as well as financial. Let's take a little trip back in time and look at how a few jobs have changed because of the incorporation of ICT.

The Office Administrator

Twenty to thirty years ago, before the advent of computers in the office environment (or, to put it better, their takeover of the office environment) keyboard skills were possibly even more important than they are today. People used this old gadget called a typewriter. You may have seen them in museums!

A typewriter was a device with a set of keys that when pressed allowed us to print characters directly on to paper. No screen! No spell check! They were indispensable in offices and until the 1980s no office would be without one. The introduction of ICT, in terms of Personal Computers with word processing software largely replaced the tasks which the typewriter had been used for.

But the personal computer also introduced a higher level of complexity. With a typewriter you could usually embolden words - that's where our IT term “bold” comes from. Some typewriters could even underline and italicize text. Fonts could be changed on some typewriters but this was time consuming.

That was pretty much it. With the personal computer people could suddenly change the font on a whim. They could change the size of the text, change the colour of the text, use a spell checker, introduce graphics in to their documents - the list goes on. Then came mail merge where a single letter could be sent out to hundreds or thousands of individuals with ease.

Then there is filing. We still have filing cabinets, but not the rows and rows and rows that had to be used when everything was done on paper. Computerized databases meant that things could be much more efficiently filed. Plus when an employee wished to something, for example, list everything filed in alphabetical order, or an alternative order, this could be done with a few clicks of a mouse. Information could be retrieved from a database in any number of formats and more complex questions could be asked of data than had previously been possible.

Let's not forget the internet. It is sometimes referred to as the largest free library in the work and that has meant that there has been a revolution in the way in which research is conducted. Previously many organizations would employ people specifically to research information that the company needed and these involved very high skills. But let's face it - anyone can Google anything! That's right, isn't it?

Of course, it's not all a bed of roses for the office worker. With the new technology came the demand for new skills - including a greater ability to think for oneself and solve problems independently. Plus, in the past only secretaries and typists would be expected to have keyboard skills. Now, anyone who works in an office needs them, like it or not! With the internet, all that information is at our fingertips. However, as any student will tell you, there is a skill involved in getting the right results from a search engine!

So, a historical set of skills has been replaced by others for office workers. Most would agree though, that because of ICT the expectations of employers about what their employees can and should be able to do (and the time in which they should be able to do it!) is much higher than any time in history.

NEXT: Complexity - More jobs

Technology is all about change. Lots of change! These changes tend to enable us to do more things with this technology as the interfaces between the user and the technology becomes more and more user friendly. What is adds up to is an increase in complexity.

It's a hard word to get to grips with, complexity. One thing that many people do not seem to do anymore is use a dictionary. Let's go against this trend and have a look what the dictionaries have to say about the word.

Ouch! Most dictionaries will say something like “the quality or state of being complex”. Fantastic! A great help! Not!

So what is meant by the word complexity in relation to ICT? It could mean difficult but that is not really the point in terms of computers. Certainly, the knowledge of ICT we must have these days is more involved and intricate then ever before and that is where we are getting close to what is meant by the word.

Cast your mind back ten years. If you are a teenager right now, then ask an older person to do so! Can you remember getting your first mobile phone? It was hard to figure out at first, am I right? As for the manual that came with it, it would have made as much sense if it had been written in Martian! Now, think of the ease with which you use your mobile now, the speed at which you can text, the times you use it to connect with the internet, the games you play on it, the Bluetooth technology you use with it, the videos and tunes you download via your mobile.

Now imagine your past self ten years ago. If you had been asked if you could use or even would use all these complicated features, would your answer automatically have been a yes?

What you have done is adapted, over time, to the shift in mobile technology from being a simple tool with which to talk to others, to a multifaceted tool that you can use for all sorts of things.

So, my first message is this. Do not be freaked out by the complexity of ICT. You will adapt! Change happens, things get more complex, but it is something that you should embrace, not run away from.

WHAT THINGS BECOME

Life, eh? Complicated, difficult and often confusing. Most people would agree that out lives have become more complex and this is partly down to technology and the pace of change going on all around us. As we get older, too, we do not respond as well to change as when we were young. Can you remember seeing older people on the phone to a family member in another country and shouting rather than talking? They thought that it would enable the other person to hear them better if they shouted because they were so far away. How we chuckled! What we must try to avoid is loosing our ability to adapt. Change is going to happen however we resist it. Plus, the sheer scale of change over the last 50 years has been enormous. The way that organization work and operate has changed enormously. What organizations produce has also changed with a shift, in the UK at least, from manufacture to service (or even information) economies. How people work has changed, too.

Today, over 300,000 people make a living trading on eBay. Use a time machine and go back twenty years. Ask someone what eBay is. You would get a blank look!

So, change happens and it get more and more complex. You will be expected to adapt to these changes. If you work for an organization for a long time - say twenty years - your experience will be much greater than an employee who has just finished university or college. However, when new technology is introduced, long servers can often get confused by the changes and are quite often regarded by the younger workers as "dinosaurs". It is more important than ever to welcome change, work with it and adapt to it.

ICT could be your downfall. Make sure it's your saviour!

NEXT: The skills you need to use new technology

Capacity

Private organizations usually have a single aim - to make money, otherwise known as a profit! This usually leads to an effort to increase their capacity. This is a combination of increasing the amount of work an individual does to the end game of increasing the level of production. More and more organizations have become reliant on using ICT to achieve this end.

Trends

We will look at recent trends in the use of ICT - to try and make sense of what change is happening in the work place because of ICT and to see how these trends could go in the future. A good k knowledge of recent trends enables organizations to better prepare for the future and this feeds down to the employees. If you know what is going on you can anticipate what might happen in the future. This makes you more employable.

The Working Environment

How has ICT changed the working environment? In one word, enormously! From the layout of the offices in which we work, the location of our work places and opportunities such as working from home the introduction of ICT in to the work place has had a huge impact on the way work is done. We will look at these changes and consider aspects of these changes that may be cause for concern! We will then address how to limit any negative aspects that may have come about because of ICT in the working environment.

Some facts to ponder:

What does the future hold?

• By 2010 the top 10 “In demand” jobs did not exist in 2003
• Most students at College at the moment are preparing for jobs that do not yet exist
• They will be using technologies throughout their working lives that have yet to be invented!
• They will be solving problems that we do not even know exist at the moment!
• In September 2006 there were 106 million registered users of Myspace
• If that was a country it would be the 11th largest in the world
• There are almost 3 billion Google searches every month (who did we ask before?)

It is Friday afternoon, you are looking forward to a golfing week-end and contemplating how to fix your wayward drive, when a large parcel of papers is delivered to you, for next Monday's board meeting.

There is only one action item on the agenda: a proposal from the Chief Operating Officer to outsource the company's information technology operations...a proposal opposed by the Chief Information Officer, who wants to keep those operations in house.

After suppressing a colorful expletive that naturally bubbled up to the surface of your mind, you know you are in trouble. You know nothing about IT or outsourcing. You joined the board only because the fee was good and you were interested in the business. No one ever told you that you would have to make decisions about IT, computers and stuff like that.

Yet, you do know that as a director you are responsible for the good governance of the organization and you take your responsibilities seriously.

You should not have been surprised. Increasingly boards are being asked to make decisions about outsourcing information and communication technology (“ICT”) services and applications - sometimes extending to whole business processes. This is a relatively new phenomenon, as such matters have traditionally been left to CIOs and assorted other technical experts, but it is a phenomenon that is not going away.

Company boards, COOs, CEOs, CFOs, business unit managers and business proprietors will find in years to come that they are no longer be able to delegate this responsibility away.

As time goes by, the focus on outsourcing is shifting to sourcing: where is the business going to get the services, products, materials and people it needs to deliver ROI to its customers? If you look at it this way, it becomes easier to see why CEOs and boards should concern themselves with such matters.

It's Governance, Stupid

Get the sourcing strategy right and your business will grow or at least hold its own, even in turbulent times. Get it wrong and you may do serious damage to the performance of your business performance - or even sink the ship. Ultimately, this is an issue of governance.

The purpose of this essay is to provide the non-expert director, CEO, CFO, executive manager or business owner with a short guide to the development of a sourcing strategy, focusing on ICT: seven steps to success. The guide is based on personal experience, on research and on a deep understanding of how important ICT is to business, regardless of its size and budget.

On the subject of size, in reading and using the guide, please adapt each step to suit the scale and complexity of your business, applying sound risk management principles. Don't over-engineer. On the other hand, don't skip any of the steps, as each is fundamental to the next and, indeed, to all the others.

So, forget about golf for a while and read on.

Step 1. Determine what kind of business you are.

I suggest a different question: what is it that consumes your resources? Is it moving goods from place to place for other businesses or selling groceries or providing architectural advice to builders, just to give some examples. Notice that you are not being asked: do you run a shop or are you in a professional business or do you run a transport company? For the answer to have meaning, there has to be reasonable specificity implied by the question.

If you are David Jones or Nordstrom or Marks and Spencer, the answer should be something like: we sell a broad range of merchandise to the public from multipurpose facilities. The point is to ascertain what it is that you do that creates value. In retail, it is the activity of selling that creates value. Everything else is a cost center.

One would be unwise to outsource the activity that creates value, while one may find it useful to outsource anything that is a cost center. Note that that a choice has to be made even about the latter, which is why the core/non-core debate proved to be sterile. Boards and management must make choices, informed choices. How such choices are made is covered in the next six steps, starting with the step after the next.

To give you some notice of what may drive you to outsource or not, you need to ask yourself: what competencies do you rely on to create value for your customers? If the activity covered by a certain cost center is included under this rubric, it would be risky to your business to outsource it. Notice that a judgment is again required: it may be risky, but, taking all relevant matters into account, it may still be preferable.

Step 2. Determine your trajectory.

If you are a business concerned with selling unbranded clothing to intermediaries who then brand it and sell it to the public, do you want to change perhaps to become a seller of branded clothing to the public? This is the thinking process required by this step.

The result of this thinking process will feed into steps 4 and 5. Note that a valid answer here may be that you want to keep your options open. This can be accommodated, though you will find that, as with everything in this life, there is a price to be paid for this kind of flexibility.

In summary, at this step there are four possible trajectories: static - you plan to stay as you are; evolutionary - you want to change, but nor radically, relying more or less on the same competencies; radical - you want to transform your business into something quite different, probably requiring a different constellation of competencies; open - for very valid reasons, not through indecision, you want to keep your options open.

It is possible to craft a sourcing strategy to accommodate any of these trajectories, but first it is necessary to consider the circumstances in which the business is required to operate.

Step 3. Understand your environment.

In this context, there are only four broad categories that matter and they echo the discussion under the previous heading: steady state - minor or no changes from the present environment; predictable - there is change and it may be significant change, but the nature and pace of the change can be determined with reasonable confidence; turbulent - the environment is likely to be choppy, difficult, even threatening; unstable - the environment is inherently unstable to the point that it may change radically (or not), perhaps with little or no warning.

Occasionally these characteristics may appear in a mixed, hard to define to form. In such a case, treat your future environment as if were unstable. This amounts to sound risk management and will enable (or force) you to keep your options open and to be on your guard.

Now that you know what you are, what you want to be and what the world is likely to look like, you are ready to consider what business strategy you ought to be pursuing. You may already know this and be confident of your approach, but I would ask you then to do a quick review of that approach against your findings so far, before moving on to step 5.

Step 4. Determine your business strategy.

McDonald's does not attract customers (with few exceptions one suspects) because of the quality of its food. On the other hand, people will travel to a particular destination for no reason other than the reputation of for quality food and service of a certain restaurant. In this latter case, we are not dealing with convenience or fun for kids.

McDonald's and Tetsuya's or est, est, est or…substitute your own locus of culinary heaven here - are not competitors; they do not occupy the same ecological niche - or business space - although they are both ostensibly in the “restaurant business”. Having said that, it is sometimes possible for businesses that are not direct competitors to cause great damage to each other. For example, Woolworth's and the local corner store are not in the same ecological niche. One goes to the former for range and price and to the latter for convenience and customer service. It should be possible for both to carry on safely in their own business space.

However, the mere presence of a giant Woolworth's supermarket in the neighborhood may take away sufficient business from the corner store so it's no longer viable.

This is comparable to the impact humans have on other species. We are not competitors with pandas or with tigers for food. On the other hand, by using portions of the habitat used by these species as cultivated forests and leaving them only with small segments of native forest, we may be causing their extinction.

Coming back to the matter at hand, by now you have identified what your business does, whether you intend to stay in that line of business and what it is that makes your business unique. These are all assets that must be preserved - if not enhanced - by means of a sourcing strategy. Now comes the time to craft such a strategy. You may already have such a strategy, perhaps prompted by someone's call to outsource ICT, usually for the purpose of “cutting costs”.

If so, please review that strategy now, in the light of your conclusions from steps 1 through to 4, before moving on to step 6.

Step 5. Craft a sourcing strategy.

Limiting ourselves to ICT, to keep things simple, how important is ICT to what you do, what you intend to do and how you create value for your customers? If you run a small grocery store, not much, one could safely say. If you run a nationwide chain of supermarkets, it is vital to your survival. You cannot run a low margin, high volume, logistics dependent, 24x7 business without solid, reliable ICT infrastructure. I have emphasized the key words by underlining them.

In these circumstances, the ICT sourcing strategy must have key performance indicators (KPIs) that focus on these success criteria: efficient, scalable, reliable, redundant infrastructure - that is price sensitive. The strategy will probably support large investments by the business and/or its ICT supplier(s), because there will be a guarantee of reasonably predictable high volume traffic.

Let us consider another example, a discrete manufacturing concern that creates value for customers by being first to market with innovative appliances for home use. Again, the key characteristics of a sound approach for the business are derived by analyzing the underlined words.

The business relies on multiple suppliers to support its value chain and is likely to require ICT to manage a complex web of interactions with suppliers and perhaps among suppliers. The business will need access to ICT tools that support innovation, culturally and operationally. Quality, agility, responsiveness and reliability are paramount, price is less important, and the KPIs should reflect these attributes.

These are only examples and each board, CEO, business unit manager or business proprietor will have to do this analysis ad hoc, focusing on the unique characteristics of the business, rather than on generalities. However, this is a field where it is possible to acquire quality advice and where there are many instructive case studies available for study and analysis.

Step 6. What about culture?

However, if you are purchasing packages of services or outsourcing whole business processes, for example, cultural fit with the supplier is essential - lack of it means that both parties (as well as your customers) will suffer.

The concept of culture may seem vague, but it can be made concrete by considering this question: can the supplier meet its ROI targets by helping you meet yours?

If the answer is positive, it is likely that there will be a cultural fit. If not, this will provide another, significant risk to be factored into the overall equation.

On to the last step, doing it, rather than just talking about it.

Step 7. Execution.

Wrapping up and moving on

These seven steps will help guide you to understand what is required to devise and execute a successful sourcing strategy, for ICT or for anything else for that matter. However, this guidance is no substitute for your own professional judgment and expertise. Blend these with the ingredients provided here and you will have exercised due diligence and good sense. No one can ask for more.