How is IT impacting your business?
A recent article by InformationWeek explored the top 10 CIO priorities. Topping the list was IT’s ability to “implement fast enough to meet business goals”, followed by “making IT one with the business”. And with cloud computing, the consumerization of IT, and security and compliance issues, today’s IT leaders have a lot on their plate.
Which brings us to the question: How is IT impacting your business?
As technology constantly evolves it’s becoming harder and harder for businesses to maintain an in-house IT staff that can provide the necessary expertise and service 24x7x365. Not to mention the ability to get new technology up and running in a matter of days versus months.
How many organizations today have the luxury – or patience – to wait months for a new technology or initiative to go live? Or how many would find an outage acceptable, especially if it affects the company’s ability to communicate with its customers (impact on service) or process orders (impact on revenue)? I’m guessing not too many.
An IT department that can become more strategic, utilizing technology to grow the business instead of focusing solely on operational cost savings, is well positioned to succeed. For many businesses that might be easier said than done, especially as we continue to see limited resources and budget constraints. But it’s not a long-shot.
Enter the managed service provider.
Let’s say you transfer the support and maintenance of your infrastructure to a managed service provider. You have the potential to save in both capex and opex. In fact, a recent CompTIA study revealed that among current users of managed services, 46% of firms have trimmed their annual IT expenditures by 25% or more as a result of their shift to managed services, including 13% that have slashed annual IT expenditures by 50% or more. An additional 50% of organizations have saved between 1-24% in IT costs annually. Plus, IT is now free to focus on the core business while the service provider proactively manages the network. The CompTIA study showed that, while costs savings are the top factor in deciding to use managed services, more than half of respondents indicated that they use an MSP to free up their internal IT staff to work on projects that fall into the business’ core competencies or revenue-generating activities.
With managed services, you also get faster time to service. Service or technology initiatives that used to take months to implement can be implemented in hours or days by a team of highly skilled specialists using best-of-breed technologies and vendors. What a tremendous competitive advantage to have experts in IT infrastructure management on your team to worry about the daily operational functions, while you focus on making IT one with the business.
So how is IT impacting your business? Hopefully it’s focused on making a positive impact on top line revenue. If you’re finding that hard to do, check out our slideshow on The Business Impact of IT.
