Picture a mid-sized plastics manufacturer in Bursa: the IT coordinator starts every morning by checking the server room, swapping backup tapes, and chasing the network provider when the connection drops. Most of the day goes into keeping the infrastructure alive. When the accounting manager needs a report, it gets done by evening at best. This is a familiar picture for many Turkish SMEs. As companies grow and their software environments become more complex, the question of what the IT department is actually for becomes impossible to avoid.
Broadband connections are spreading rapidly across Turkey right now, and for the first time companies are taking a serious look at software solutions accessible over the internet. Some software vendors have started offering a model where the application runs on the vendor’s own infrastructure and the customer connects through a browser — rather than installing anything on local servers. This approach is known as ASP, or Application Service Provider. Instead of purchasing a licence and managing the installation, the company pays a monthly or annual fee; the vendor handles the servers, backups, and updates. In Turkey this model is not yet widespread, but it is attracting genuine interest among newly established SMEs and those in a growth phase.
The effect on the IT department is direct and concrete. When a company no longer operates its own servers, a large portion of the IT coordinator’s daily workload simply disappears: hardware maintenance, operating system patches, backup routines, licence tracking. In their place, a different set of responsibilities emerges. The IT team now needs to monitor the vendor’s service reliability, contract terms, and support quality. Managing a vendor relationship demands a very different skill set from resolving a hardware fault at two in the morning.
The most visible change shows up in how the IT team relates to the rest of the business. In a company that has moved its infrastructure outside, the IT coordinator needs to understand what the production planning team actually needs from its reports, what the purchasing process expects from the software, and where the accounting module is falling short. Following up on problem tickets with the vendor, coordinating user training sessions, making sure data flows correctly between modules — these tasks require process knowledge far more than technical expertise. An IT coordinator in a textile or food company is now spending more time in meeting rooms than in the server room.
Integration is one of the most critical points in this transition. When an ERP system running on an ASP model needs to exchange data with the company’s accounting software or stock tracking tool, the IT team is responsible for making that work. File-based transfers, ODBC connections, and the data export formats the software vendor provides are the practical tools of the job. An IT coordinator who could previously defer integration work while managing local servers now has to take direct ownership of these scenarios. The problems do not go away — they just require a different kind of attention.
This transition does not happen at the same pace in every company, and there are real obstacles. Internet connectivity in Turkey is not yet reliable enough in every region; in smaller industrial districts across Anatolia, ADSL access is still inconsistent. When the connection goes down, the system becomes unreachable, and this is the main reason company managers remain cautious about the model. There is also the question of trust: the idea that company data sits on someone else’s infrastructure rather than on a local server is not easy for many managers to accept. The IT coordinator needs to address both objections with concrete answers — how redundant connectivity will be arranged, and what guarantees cover data security.
For managers looking to navigate this shift, a few practical criteria stand out. First, the IT coordinator’s capacity to understand business processes should be assessed honestly — technical knowledge is still necessary but no longer sufficient on its own. Second, any vendor contract should include explicit service level commitments, and tracking those commitments should be assigned clearly to the IT team. Third, responsibility for internal user support and training coordination needs a clear owner. The server room may be shrinking or disappearing entirely, but the business value of a well-positioned IT function is actually growing — provided the role is defined to match the new reality.
This article was originally written in Turkish by Gökhan MERCANOĞLU on April 10, 2006 and has been automatically translated into English and other languages using machine translation.