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Total IT spend is on the rise, and pressure is likely mounting to increase the IT investment at your Portfolio Companies. Many Private Equity firms are caught off guard by a larger than anticipated increase in IT operational budgets and capex. Some of the increase may come from IT expenditures which were differed the prior year. 

Learn how to offset unexpected IT investments and manage your spend with these six tips. 

When acquiring a new Portfolio Company, there are two important things to look at when it comes to IT operating costs. First, you should look at where the company's IT spend has been invested. Second, and more importantly, you need to look at where it hasn't been allocated. 

When you're under LOI, it's important to understand the current state of a company's IT environment before fully committing to the acquisition.  Knowing if a company's IT systems are saleable and able to support the future growth of the company will give you the confidence you need to proceed. However, all to often companies are hit with surprise capital expenses. 

In order to expose common IT costs within Portfolio Companies, we explore the top three hidden capex for IT.

As the Salesforce Practice Leader for Messina's Consulting division, I'm fortunate to have the chance to meet Salesforce professionals of all stripes. With our consulting practice hiring and our staffing practice placing professionals, its no surprise that, from time to time, my conversations with other individuals revolves around making a career move. 

Selecting the right CRM platform for your business is an important decision that notably affects employee productivity, as well as your ability to improve customer service, satisfaction and increase profits. With more than one hundred CRM packages in the market, it’s crucial for your executive and IT teams to work through the selection process together, focusing on your business objectives to help narrow the field. 

Generally speaking, the larger the company and the more complex the functionality, the more time you should spend on selecting the best CRM. In order to successfully improve your business, here are some Do’s and Don’ts to help you properly go through the CRM selection process. 

Salesforce is the leading cloud-based CRM that businesses use to streamline marketing, sales and customer service. The main drivers for implementation include the productivity and efficiency created by using a single CRM collaborative platform, the Software as a Service (SaaS) pay as you go model and acceleration of top-line revenue growth.

While Salesforce is a flexible platform, many companies fail to realize the expected return on investment. 

Tech Republic describes a use case as “a formalized story that describes how someone procedurally interacts with an existing or proposed software and they should be part of every project manager’s permanent tool set.”

Use cases are created to set the tone for a procedural change, and aim to capture the functional requirements for a given technology or software. They focus on the users of a particular system, not the system itself, and help the engagement team understand the business needs, see patterns, streamline operations and question practices. Use cases tell the story of your current and future operations, and provide a guide for the software project. Without them, its easy for project development to venture away from the intended goal, which is often costly and time consuming to fix. Below are four best practices when conducting use case reviews for a CRM platform selection.

When it comes to performance management, the old adage is true: you get what you measure.

Though it sounds simple enough, when it comes to performance management, most organizations struggle with defining which metrics to measure, how to measure them and why to measure them in the first place.

At Messina Group Consulting, our BI practice is continuously advising our clients to embrace self-service BI, releasing the shackles of IT controlled data and empowering the business with data discovery and visualization. This evolution has done wonders for the business community, giving our clients the ability to conduct their own analysis on-demand, without the involvement of IT.

However, as we’ve told many of our clients when helping them craft their BI roadmaps, these new benefits of on-demand data can complicate one of the most important considerations in today’s IT landscape: Data security.

Business Intelligence & Analytics: For many, this is an area that generates a lot of hype because it involves turning data from multiple sources into powerful insights for a business’ decision-makers. However, along with the hype comes the trepidation over the associated challenges – especially those related to successfully implementing the right BI software solution for your business.

On today's market, there are a variety of BI software solutions available that provide a range of features including interactive dashboards, robust reporting functionality and game-changing insights at varying price points. Although most advertise that they provide a plug-and-play solution where users can easily integrate their data sources and produce instant and eye-opening BI dashboards, unfortunately, most users end up finding out the hard way that their BI software implementation doesn’t end up that way.