Looking inside and out
CPA firms tap internal, external resources to build IT strategies
08/01/2011
By Seth Fineberg – Accounting Today
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Copied excerpt below:
More firm spending continues to roll into IT, and recent Accounting Today research showed that as of late last year, most accountants were spending anywhere from 5 percent to 10 percent of their annual budgets on IT, and it’s expected for that to remain the same or increase over the next year.
Exactly how firms are going about planning their technological futures – be it replacing outdated servers and software, virtualization, or opting for cloud-service – varies based on size and business relationships.
What is clear is that many practices are seeking outside counsel via the accounting software reseller community and technology consultants – which in some cases are affiliated with the firm.
INTRA-FIRM COOPERATION
Los Angeles-based SingerLewak acquired a technology practice several years ago, and as a result formed the Enterprise Risk Management Services Division. And last year, the firm established a cloud consulting services group, SingerLewak Systems. Although historically such practices affiliated with accounting firms have not always worked together directly, both groups are seeing more internal interaction.
Recently, the firm’s ERMS Division is handling a heavier internal workload, moving the firm towards virtualization and using hosted or Software-as-a-Service-based applications and services – tasks ERMS senior manager Rick Mark and SingerLewak’s director of IT, Ho Nguyen, are working on jointly.
“I think because our firm is large enough to have dedicated IT, we are trying to push productivity in terms of identifying services, specifically looking at what services and what apps does it make sense to do and what’s available to us,” said Nguyen. “Whether it’s internal or external cloud, we want to make sure that all of our users can get to what we need them to.”
Mark stressed that developing an IT plan for a firm involves, generally, looking at where a firm is and wants to go and, more important, paying attention to what other firms of a similar size are doing.
“The CPA industry is pretty tight-knit, so with all the networking that goes on, they need to talk about what they do and use that time to plan for themselves; do the research on what your competition is doing for sure,” said Mark. “Companies are changing daily and weekly these days, not yearly, and we have to build to absorb at whatever speed our clients are at. As a profession, we don’t do that enough to ourselves.”
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