What Is IT Strategy ?
You have a vision. You’re trying to get somewhere. That’s why you’re in business. You’ve explored options, calculated risks, and taken the dive into a competitive world to kick ass and take names. Your business is your focus, and as a business leader, it’s on you to keep this thing moving forward. That’s why you need a solid and integrated IT strategy.
As a strategic tool in your arsenal, managed IT services have the potential to take you where you want to go, but it’s up to you to pick it up and use it. That’s why strategic IT planning is a crucial element in your overall business strategy. It ensures you’re prepared to handle the next thing
Companies that had solid IT strategy consulting partners were prepared for the COVID lockdowns that started in March of 2020. While many businesses were left scrambling to navigate restrictions, work-from-home setups, and remote collaboration tools, businesses that had an IT strategy pivoted quickly and nimbly. Their teams seamlessly adapted to remote work operations and were able to focus their attention on more pressing matters, like strategizing how to keep business moving in the midst of a global crisis.
IT strategy services ensure that your business is protected, agile, and equipped to take on the next big thing, whatever that may be.
Why a Great IT Strategy Is Effective for Growing Your Business
Workplace technology is here to stay. It will only continue to evolve and advance. As such, strategic IT solutions play a key position in your ability to effectively grow your business.
A strong IT strategy facilitates growth in a number of ways:
- It enables your team to work at full capacity. By building IT systems around your specific goals and creating a plan for continued evolution, you reduce friction in processes and give your teams the tools they need to reach maximum productivity.
- It ensures that every element of your IT system aligns with your organization’s goals. In order to meet your strategic ends, you need to make sure you’re on the right trajectory at every step. Make sure your IT isn’t set to veer you off course.
- It decreases waste and maximizes investments. With a business IT strategy in place, you know exactly how each device and system contributes to your goals. Every element serves a purpose, and every purchase is part of a plan.
- It lays out a proactive budget to prepare for and understand expenses. A strong IT strategy allows you to plan and gauge expenses in advance quarter by quarter, year after year. It gives you the facts you need to make strategic budgetary plans.
- It allows you to scale. Strategic IT planning is scalable because it looks beyond the next device purchase or the next software update and creates an integrated system that can grow and adapt with your business. It cuts disorder and looks to the future.
Good IT strategy is good business strategy. Without it, you leave your business vulnerable to inefficient process, security risks, and operational sprawl. With it, you have the tools you need to stay ahead of your competitors and grow your revenues.
Our Approach to Developing the Right IT Strategy ?
Strategic IT planning is at the core of Barasupport’s service offerings, and we’re committed to helping each client define the strategy that’s right for them.
There is no one-size-fits-all IT approach. Your business is unique, and your business IT strategy has to be tailored to your distinct operations. That’s why it’s important to dive into your setting and objectives and create a plan that meets your needs.
For that reason, we begin with a comprehensive IT audit and assessment.
This process has four key phases:
Team Survey
Executive interview
Network discovery.
IT audit.
The IT audit becomes a fact and research-based foundation for making strategic decisions about IT planning and goals.
Then comes the roadmap. As part of our IT strategy services, we identify and present a comprehensive set of recommendations and options for every aspect of your system. Then, we engage with you as decision makers and work through cost-benefit and time-to-value decisions across the next several years. We get ahead of the curve and serve as your CIO to guide executive conversations and attain alignment across the team.
The final roadmap becomes an actionable business IT strategy plan rooted in C-level consensus. It includes timelines, necessary resources, project and initiative descriptions, and a clear projection for budgeting needs and replacement schedule for the coming two years.
C-level involvement is essential throughout this process. Strategic IT solutions planning is all about evaluating business goals, considering what it takes to achieve them, then defining the tools and processes necessary to make it happen.
No one knows your business, your teams, your workflows, and your pain points better than you. We do the work to assess your systems, document findings, present recommendations, project costs, and advise as you take the next step in your business journey.
Few of Our Client’s feedback of users!
No IT Strategy Will Hurt in the Long Run
An IT strategy isn’t a luxury. It’s a necessity. Without it, you run the risks of falling behind, wasting resources, and losing focus. It’s a big deal.
When COVID lockdowns suddenly changed the business landscape, companies that operated with a “we’ll take it as it comes” IT mentality wasted valuable lead time trying to create resources, enable collaboration, and upend their “it works for now” setup.
By contrast, companies like Blanton Turner, one of Seattle’s premier real estate management firms, was able to make the transition to remote work within 24 hours. Blanton Turner’s Principal & Creative Innovator, Chasten Fulbright, explains it this way, “We spent all of one day fine tuning our system to work for this unique situation. Because we had the infrastructure in place, it was a very easy switch to enable our entire workforce to work remotely. Barasupport’s strategic approach prepared us for the unexpected.”
And as the world transitions more and more to remote work as a standard, your IT strategy also becomes a core element to attracting and retaining the team members you need to excel.
Review your existing IT system. Do you have…
- Unified communications systems in place?
- Cloud-based file sharing?
- A highly trained and mobile-ready workforce?
- Remote access solutions?
- Strong security that protects your people, your data, and your business regardless of where your team works?
- A plan for building your IT infrastructure over the next three to five years?
If the answer is no, it’s time to set a plan in place.
IT strategy is all about building for the future. It allows you to leverage key tools necessary to stay agile when external disruptions threaten to tear you off course.
Don’t get left behind.
Let’s Build an IT Strategy
We partner with you and offer CIO guidance through this process, beginning with the Foundational IT Assessment, which enables us to understand your business on a deep level. Then we work with your executive team to define goals, create a roadmap, and budget for the future.
At the end of the day, you’ll have profound alignment in your teams, with your IT service provider, and with the overall objectives you want to reach. It all comes down to knowing where you want to go and leveraging the IT tools that can get you there.