David, having been a private pilot for decades, and a skydiver, I can relate to your metaphor.
The common characteristics of these and good business IT are good planning and risk management. You take these seriously when skydiving, but most business owners don’t take IT this way – although poor IT could lead to disaster.
Planning where your business wants to be, and then how IT supports that objective, and your strategies, is the best approach. However this generally falls down because people lack the education to make choices at the next level – they understand what they want from a business perspective but don’t know what IT choices they have.
Here you have the whole range of options – from asking the neighbour, asking your son or daughter who is studying programming, up to asking and paying for a business professional who understands the issues. At this point you will get what you pay for.
However, there are a couple of under-rated or under-utilised options at this point. The first is to look around for outstanding companies in your field, or who are outstanding in another field that you can relate your business practices to, and see how they approach their IT solutions. This may give you a whole new outlook.
And secondly explore around the social networks, the twitters, Facebook, blogs and forums and see which people are really happy with their approach to IT, and copy their ideas.
Unless you are a pioneer, or a parachute tester, don’t set out on your own new path. Take the best ideas from someone else and feed those into your own thinking about the IT options available to you, to enable your business goals.
James was the editor and publisher of SmartCompany and LeadingCompany for five years. He is now the Australian Financial Review‘s companies & markets editor, and a former BRW editor.
