How do you know that your business is on the right path? What things do you have in place to ensure that your business is working towards concrete goals? Just like you take time to plan your strategy when it comes to products and services, it’s also a good idea to take time when planning a business IT strategy. When you develop and plan your IT strategy, it will help to make sure that you are properly anticipating the IT needs of your business, proactively protecting against cybersecurity issues and more. Working with Nauticon is one way to ensure that you are successful when planning a business IT strategy. How can you get started?
Why Do You Need an IT Strategy?
An IT strategy is an essential part of any business, as it can help to guide your future business decisions and enable positive business outcomes that are backed up by the technology that you implement. Without a strategy, you might completely forget to factor in your IT needs or you might need to reconsider them every time you sit down to make other decisions. Some of the questions that you should answer when you are developing and planning a business IT strategy include:
- Where is our business today?
- What are our goals and hopes for the future?
- What do we currently have in our IT or technology portfolio?
- What are our current IT challenges?
- Where would our business like to be?
- What capabilities do we need to achieve our business goals?
- What is the difference between where we are now and where we want to be?
- What partners can we bring on board to help grow our business even more?
In short, once you are done planning a business IT strategy, you should have answers to who, what, when, where and why when it comes to your tech. Your IT strategy will contain documentation that captures your vision and all of your strategic planning work for your IT program.
Why Is an IT Strategy So Beneficial?
Taking time for developing and planning a business IT strategy is so beneficial, and everyone in your organization should be involved. Some of the benefits of a properly designed IT strategy include:
- Creating a united approach to IT across your business so that you improve collaboration, reduce the chances of duplication, increase productivity and minimize errors.
- Improving your data collection and analytics practices so that you are sure that your IT solutions are living up to their expectations.
- Developing a comprehensive approach to cybersecurity and acutely identifying shortcomings and vulnerabilities so that you can protect your business data and better protect your client data as well.
- Improving the resilience of your IT infrastructure to reduce downtime further and reduce the costs that can be associated with extended periods of downtime.
- Giving your IT department a more proactive role when budgeting and planning with future resources to ensure that they have what they need to grow and protect your business.
- Improving the communication between different departments within your company that can sometimes be detached from each other, like IT and marketing.
When you are ready to start developing and planning a business IT strategy, Nauticon is here to support you.
How to Plan and Develop Your IT Strategy
- Start by assessing your business objectives and considering where you want to go. What parts of your business are you attempting to grow?
- Next, speak with the most important stakeholders at your business to learn more about how things currently are. You should not only speak with current members of the IT department, but also people in other departments who might have insight on their current challenges and things that might help them to better achieve their goals.
- After you’ve gathered information on how things currently are, you should think critically about the IT requirements that your business needs and your current infrastructure. What are your current capabilities? What do you use now to minimize disruptions and keep things on track?
- How will you know that you are making progress? Key performance indicators, or KPIs, are the way that you will be able to see if you are making progress. Your KPIs might look very different depending on how your business operates and how much tech you use. Think about what could help indicate if tech changes are successful, like amount of downtime or capacity utilization.
- Next, you’ll want to define a budget and make sure that all stakeholders are on the same page when implementing changes and measuring KPIs. Sweeping changes require everyone to be on the same page!
- Work with Nauticon to identify the right resources to transform your business. We have a wealth of experience in developing and planning a business IT strategy for businesses of every size, and we can help you pinpoint IT and infrastructure changes that will help aid in the changes you want to achieve at your business.
- Measure your progress. You might think that the process is over once you purchase the new pieces of technology and implement the changes, but it’s important to know that it isn’t! You’ll start to assess the KPIs regularly so that you can see whether or not your changes are having the intended impact. Then, you will be able to go back to the drawing board and explore other ideas if the changes that you made were not successful. IT planning isn’t something that you can do once and never do again. Instead, it’s a process.
Get Help Developing and Planning a Business IT Strategy with Nauticon
Nauticon is a leading provider of managed services, workflow solutions and other office technology solutions that can transform your workspace. If you are looking for a better way to meet your office’s needs, we are here to help. To learn more about our company and see how we can bring innovative, real-world solutions for your office’s needs to you, contact us today by calling (301) 279-0123.
