CWP: Lastly, what challenges does your company face when it comes to IT implementation and use?

Tucay: One of the challenges is usually resistance from management, once they see the price there would automatically be resistance. What I think of, every time I design (requirements) for the company, is that, if I leave the company one day, they will not have difficulties in managing the existing infrastructure. But since they always want what costs less, there sometimes are trade-offs like when you go for open source, it may be cheaper but it’s not that easy to maintain such that if you hire new graduates, they may not be able do it knowledge-wise. So you would have to hire someone with better experience and knowledge, which of course means a bigger salary so you have to work around those trade-offs. One other challenge that I see in our line of business is resistance, this time among the users. Say, although we know our 3D department will be more productive using Linux, our users do not want to have to learn a new technology and they feel like their creativity is stifled, and also since having to learn a new operating system may be too time-consuming, you just stick with the system that they work better with and try to optimize productivity.

Javeniar: With me, what happens is every decision about IT has to come from me. The management usually waits for me to tell them what I want to implement then they would just approve it. Even talking to suppliers is part of my job; so what our purchasing manager and I would do is, I talk to the supplier to tell them what we need then, when all the specifications are okay, that’s the time our purchasing manager talks to them to discuss the price, ask for a little discount, etc.

Encarnacion: There are several challenges, the most basic probably being implementing IT effectively at the lowest cost possible. Every IT project should be attached to benefits and, sometimes, even if the benefits are there but if it’s not within a certain level of cost, you cannot implement it. To give you an example, the IP-VPN is a blessing to us because it’s a cheaper way of interconnecting your branches compared to leased lines but I had to wait for the time when the cost is just right for our budget before I was able to centralize and distribute the technology across the network. Fast turn-over of IT staff is, I think, a challenge for all of us here. For example, employees well-versed in SAP are often pirated, so we have to hire somebody with no SAP knowledge because it will be too expensive for us to hire someone with SAP knowledge. I’ll hire somebody with a potential and train the guy for sometime so he works for me for a good while until he realizes that he is worth more—but that is basically the cycle and you can only do so much about that. Another challenge is how to instill IT literacy among end users because, in every IT project, the IT literacy of the end-user is critical so you need to orient them properly about the benefits of this IT project and how it would affect them.

Pabellon: Internally, in our organization, we are all IT people so we have no problems and are all often excited when it comes to implementing something—even our top management is IT-savvy. Cost, probably, is one thing that is common between vendors or suppliers and end-users because you all have to deal with management costs, talent cost, IT investment cost, managing operations. One challenge I have observed among SMEs, though, is sometimes top management has different expectations from the IT manager or the IT service provider. That’s why it is important that top management be involved in not only the approval of IT projects but also in the planning, development, and implementation stages—because it’s difficult when you do not know what they want and need exactly and you try your best to align the IT projects to the business but when things fail, all the blame is on you. So they have to be involved right form the beginning, they should tell you their expectations, their objectives, what they want to accomplish, their targets, etc.

Another issue that SMEs face is when the necessary information is not available to them. If you are a big company, it is the vendor who comes to you and spends time to really explain their products and services to you; but it’s not that way for the SMEs. Another challenge is that sometimes projects are not business-driven—they don’t assign specific metrics or a business objective for an IT project. IT people cannot really expect the management to understand the technical stuff so what you can do is learn about the business and find out how IT can be used to demonstrate measurable contribution to the business.

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