Your IT Career
by Eric Bloom
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Help your company sell its products and save money

By Eric Bloom

• Work proactively with our business partners to reduce their costs through easy-to-employ inexpensive technologies. For example, writing new reports that will save people from doing things manually, cleaning up people’s PCs so they run more quickly.
• Be an agent of change. Maximizing process efficiently is a core competency of most IT professionals. Work with your business partners to help them design better ways to get their work done. The longstanding/old name for this is Process Reengineering.

On the revenue side, there are also a number of things that IT can to help maximize company sales and other moneys coming in. They include the development and enhancement of sales customer service tools that help maximize the effectiveness of the company’s sales force. These tools include:

• Customer Resource Management (CRM)
• Pre-sales tools, such as custom calculators, product demo tools
• Easy to use order management tools helping to facilitate efficient order taking
• Website-based order placement to allow customers to directly order products without salesperson intervention
• Customer Service tools that allow people within the Customer Service group to more quickly help customers solve their issues. This has a three way benefit of making customers happy, reducing customer service costs, and allows customer service people to back sell additional products and services to in-calling customers.

In closing, yes, all of these ideas take company money and resources to accomplish; neither of which your company can currently spare if they are having financial difficulty. If you, and your fellow IT professionals, have this headset, many small, impactful changes can probably be made, each of which may be small, but collectively could provide great current and future value to the company you love.

If you have any questions about your career in IT, please email me at
eric@ManagerMechanics.com or find me on Twitter at @EricPBloom.

Until next time, work hard, work smart, and continue to grow.

Read more of Eric Bloom's Your IT Career blog and follow the latest IT news at ITworld. Follow Eric on Twitter at @EricPBloom. For the latest IT news, analysis and how-tos, follow ITworld on Twitter and Facebook.

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Eric P. Bloom, a former CIO, is president of Manager Mechanics LLC, a company specializing in information technology (IT) leadership development and the governing organization for the Information Technology Management and Leadership Professional (ITMLP©) and Information Technology Management and Leadership Executive (ITMLE©) certifications.

He is also a keynote speaker, nationally syndicated columnist, National Speakers Association member, and author of various books including the following:

- The CIO’s Guide to Staff Needs, Growth, and Productivity
- Your IT Career: Get Noticed, Get Promoted, and Build Your Professional Brand
- Manager Mechanics: Tips and Advice for First-Time Managers.

Prior to founding Manager Mechanics, Eric led technology at Independence Investments and The Boston Company Asset Management. Eric was also a SVP of Business Systems at Monster Worldwide and a VP of Software Development at Fidelity Investments.

Eric began his career as a software developer (programmer) and moved through the ranks to CIO. He understands IT management from the bottom up. As they say, "He walks the walk."

Additional information on Eric can be found at www.ericpbloom.com and www.ManagerMechanics.com. He can be contacted at eric@ManagerMechanics.com.