When it comes to drafting up the yearly budget, organizations are always looking to gain efficiencies. This could involve cuts to programs, salaries, or physical equipment. There are always more dollars to be saved. 

Sometimes, it is not about making cuts but simply managing finances more efficiently. Putting more money towards new programs or initiatives and hiring more employees to meet demand are examples of re-prioritization. 

Whatever the situation at your organization, an IT financial management system (ITFM) can help you plan, maintain, and meet the economic goals set forth. Let us take a look at some of the essential elements of ITFM. 

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Supply chains are networks between an organization and others who provide materials or products eventually destined for a consumer. A supply chain can be complex. Besides physical resources, it can also handle things like digital information, entities, and even people. Depending on the size of a particular organization, they can have entire teams dedicated to overseeing a supply chain. It can be a vital component to the operation of any business.

Why is supply chain security important? If there is no product, there is no business. Disruptions to the supply chain can cripple an organization. Not only do they need to be concerned about their suppliers, but they also need to guard their systems. Supply chain cyber attacks can fracture lines of communication, records of transactions, inventory, and forecasting for the future. Cyber criminals have found supply chains to be a source of valuable information about an organization's current or future plans, as well as being a source for general confidential information not intended for outsiders. If you work with your organization's supply chain, how can you protect yourself? How can you ensure business runs to forecast? We have some tips for staying safe and operational.

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At the forefront, most people understand cloud computing as delivering services, such as servers & storage without owning their own physical infrastructure. Its qualities include being secure, reliable, on-demand, and on the go. It is used in sectors across the board, including government, healthcare, and education. Cloud technology is forward-thinking, and it is the way of the future. Still not convinced? Data sourced by Hosting Tribunal says that this popular technology is only going to keep growing. They state that public cloud infrastructure will grow by 35% in 2021 and by 2025, the amount of data stored in cloud data centers will be over 100 zettabytes. Yes, you read that correctly, that's 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes!

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What is an Automated Information System (AIS)?

You may not know a lot about AIS, but it can help your business. Automated Information Systems (AIS) are computer-based collections of data and software that use the input of various resources to automate the management of operations and information, creating useful output that can help a company make strategic decisions. AIS is a compilation of hardware, software, or both to automate communication, documentation, reporting, processing, and storing information, and typically has a front-end interface where a user interacts with the system, a back-end database or a similar mechanism for storing items such as management reports, real-time transaction processing feeds from other systems, and middleware logic used to tie it all together.

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With the rise of mobile commerce, companies need to constantly accommodate customer demands to ensure their business is keeping up with technological advancements. It is not enough to have a website to sell services and products. According to Allied Market Research, "The global mobile payment market size was valued at $1.48 trillion in 2019, and is projected to reach $12.06 trillion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 30.1% from 2020 to 2027." In a study completed by Dynamic Yield, three out of four consumers answered that they prefer using their mobile to make purchases to save time. As a business, you must ensure you are able to reduce the barrier to purchase for your customers. Customer-facing applications have become a norm in EUC, which stands for "End-User Computing".

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Today, you would be hard-pressed to find an industry that does not rely on technology, whether directly or indirectly. From healthcare to retail and everything in-between technology is used to gather, share, monitor, and create.

Though similar technologies appear across different industries, they often serve alternative purposes. Similarly, however, technology is designed to streamline day-to-day processes. Although, some may argue that it has complicated things further!

Are you interested about the role of IT across industries? Get ready for 'IT education' as we explore various components of tech uptake across the information technology sector.

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To help simplify the interactions between a customer and a company, a helpful tool has increasingly grown in use in the market. It aids in answering repeated queries of customers among other functions, and is called a "support chatbot", or "automated chatbot" or "customer service bot".

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Organizations of all sizes have traditionally had in-house IT staff, or at least an employee or two, who could figure out tech-related issues when they arise. Duties of in-house IT staff also include procuring new technology and maintaining existing infrastructure. In recent times, there has been a shift away from this traditional approach thanks to the onset of cloud technology, which has fundamentally changed IT. Organizations who have adopted this technology now find that in-house IT has become redundant, or at least less significant, since most or all data management is occurring offsite via external cloud vendors. Organizations may elect to keep in-house IT teams to support business partners in tech and rectify small-scale issues among employees; however, IT as a service is becoming a more popular solution for modern organizations.

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Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a software engineering approach for IT operations. It utilizes software as a tool for managing systems, automating tasks, and solving problems to ensure the availability of your applications mainly through the process of monitoring service-level metrics. These metrics are related to business objectives, made up of shared goals across your team, the capabilities of your product/service, and the customer experience.

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