Dysfunctional IT is usually due to the fact that non-technical staffers don’t understand all the elements necessary to support their infrastructure. This can lead to a disconnect that has IT feeling like nothing more than frustrated service personnel. But there are ways to align business and technical interests to revitalize your IT.
1. Understand What Users Really Want
Your company’s IT will be more effective if they understand what employees need. For example, IT would consider security and disaster recovery to be essential. Other staff would regard performance or ease-of-use as more critical to doing their jobs. While IT staffers would be quite correct, it’s usually employees who drive technical changes. Their managers are focused on achieving greater productivity, not stability. IT departments are realizing that the easiest and most effective path is collaboration in finding solutions that will satisfy both needs.
2. Identify Areas of Focus
IT and business leaders should communicate regularly on ways that information technology can help further business goals, including the following:
- Resources: hardware, software, network storage, or IT staff changes.
- Speed: increased network performance, internet bandwidth and data access speeds.
- Reliability: ways to reduce downtime from hardware, system, or application bugs.
- Security: measures such as encryption, email filtering, or virtual private networks.
- Scalability: the capacity to accommodate growth or spikes in traffic.
3. Prioritize by Cost
An IT project manager can expect to earn nearly $100,000 per year. As salaries grow and technology evolves, it becomes important to view the overall picture in terms of cost vs profit margins. When looking at IT changes, you should first define what your greatest need is, the benefits you expect to gain, and how it will improve IT operations.
4. Explore New Options
Investigate any options that could reduce both IT workload and expenses. This could be cloud services, new applications, or Ottawa managed services for IT. Managed services providers have expert staff ready to design and implement technical migrations and system upgrades. This includes both hardware and software, IT projects, system analysis, and security architecture and monitoring. The right IT services provider can both reduce costs with a scalable fee, and reduce the stress on over-burdened IT staff.
Keeping IT updated and functional can have a profound impact on every area of business. It really comes down to the decision on where to invest limited resources so that you’ll be best served in the long run.
