Recruiting an IT Consultant

A company’s ultimate goal should be to streamline its systems so that key data, such as customer and prospect contact information, can be updated synchronously, and, if possible, connected to other operational systems, such as accounting and manufacturing.

That said, ready-made solutions might be hard to find, depending on the maturity of your industry. For more traditional uses, such as accounting, packaged software solutions are readily available. For newer industries, off-the-shelf solutions are harder to find. “Take the biomedical industry—you’re inventing solutions that have never existed before for manufacturing processes that are new and different and FDA requirements that are unbelievably complex,” Capistrant says.

In these cases, companies typically need customized software packages that are then connected to their other systems. In fact, Capistrant says, the majority of his firm’s custom work is devoted to building bridges between different applications. “For various reasons, you might conclude that you need to have separate packages for different things,” Capistrant says. “Your accounting software might be one, and maybe you have a prospect-management software for another. But you still want them to talk to each other. You might want them to share data, one way or the other, or maybe synchronize. Those types of bridges can allow you to do that. In fact, synchronizing between two systems, especially between local databases and Web sites, is a huge area.”

Hitec Integration’s clients also are plagued with a common affliction. “Most of the companies we deal with have a paper problem,” Scavio says. “Today, after all these years of trying to find improvements for paper-based systems, 60, 70, maybe 80 percent of all business information in an office is still on paper.”

Such paper dependency not only is wasteful, but it also forces firms to commit valuable   office space to file cabinets and to invest unnecessarily in copy machine purchases and maintenance. This problem is compounded, Scavio explains, by the fact that today’s businesses, especially publicly owned enterprises, are legally required to keep more documents for longer stretches of time.

Sure, online storage is available and increasingly inexpensive and can eliminate some of your bulky paper files. But many companies that adopt electronic storage simply exchange file cabinets full of ignored and unused documents with virtual ones.