How to design a software strategy for your firm

Ann Dempster, managing director of Plum Software, explains how to plan a strategy to get the most out of your IT resources

Do you know to what extent your business relies on software? Or how much paper you have in your office? Do you know how cost-effective your systems are – or even what they cost you every year to run? How efficient are those same systems – and are they the best available for your business? Do you waste time entering the same details into your systems more than once?

Technology is a dynamic element of your business – it doesn’t stand still, and so if you already have software or systems in place in your firm, you need to regularly check your procedures.

The information age

We all need to work more efficiently. We are living in a world dominated by emails, internet, social networking sites and instant access to information. As an IFA, your clients expect you to keep up with these trends, whether they are 21 or 61. Five years ago, did you expect senior citizens to have their life dominated by mobile telephones? You may believe that your elderly clients do not expect you to have sophisticated systems but they soon will – and the generation that has grown up living and breathing technology will definitely not expect you to have inefficient systems.

But the number of advisers using software properly, who understand the full scope of what software can do to help them, is still not high enough. Becoming totally comfortable with technology is not achieved instantly – getting to know how to use software properly as a business tool has to be done in small steps. But you will get where you want to be a lot quicker if you understand what you want to achieve and then identify your priorities so that you can choose which steps to take when.

Setting a strategy

It is vital to choose the software that is going to help you to grow as a business. If you are currently using the wrong platform, you need to change to the right one as soon as possible. It is no good to keep on adding details if these may never transfer to a new system. For example it is rare (and costly) to get a full transfer of commission details.

Think about the development of you and your staff as well. Advisers are being forced to learn more to take the exams to get to Level 4 but this does not help their IT skills. To be most efficient and cost-effective these skills have to be learnt on an individual basis. Each firm has its own identity and therefore the usefulness of group training is limited. Individual training for each firm uses the firm’s time and trainer costs to best advantage. Training has to start from what are you trying to achieve and then how best to achieve it.

Finally, you need the team to buy in to your technology strategy. To some extent, it has to be a joint decision in your firm as to how you use software to your best advantage. If you want the details to be consistent so that you can use the software as a proper customer relationship management tool, each member of your firm has to update the details.

If you want to use the software to pay people and to submit Gabriel returns, each segment of business needs to be added, and so on. Hence it is vital to have internal processes so that everyone knows what data to enter and why.

If you have not properly reviewed your systems recently, you need to understand what you can achieve with software and then decide if that will help you to move your business forward so that you can respond to today’s and tomorrow’s requirements.