More specifically, IT’s About Time for your IT department to get enough breathing space to think strategically and offer true value to the business.
In our “IT’s About Time” series, we’re blogging about some of the key problems modern IT departments are facing, and the day-to-day realities these mean for IT managers and directors working hard to deliver effective services to their business leaders and users. In doing so, in conjunction with some of our most important customers, we’ve identified 12 key areas that these problems fall into and we’ll be discussing them and, more importantly, solutions to address them.
Where are you starting your journey?
We’ve learned enough about our customers over our 30 years in business (more about that here), to know that although every IT department is different, they tend to fall into one of three broad categories.
- Functional: responsive to a ticketing system that reports and manages company IT problems
- Transformational: adopting new technology to lower costs and resolution times
- Strategic: looking at how new technology can contribute to the vision and growth of the business
Or there’s every possibility your department is a combination of at least two and even all three of the above but keeps getting bogged down in being functional. Not that there’s anything wrong at all with functional – being reliable and a ‘safe pair of hands’ is after all the core success factor for any IT department and will continue to be that way. Yet the priorities for IT are changing – our customers are telling us this, and broader research such as this survey from ComputerWeekly.com supports it.
Not enough hours in a day
It’s a frequent lament in any job – there never seems as though there’s enough hours in a day to feel fulfilled and as though you’ve accomplished everything you wanted to when you woke up that morning. IT departments are widely recognised as being overstretched and an easy target for frustration of users.
Either way, based on the reasons why our customers come on board with us, we’re willing to bet you don’t have as much time as you’d like on the ‘strategic’ category. That’s the area in which your work really becomes integral to the business and helps it drive growth rather than helping it to stand still.
Taking strides to becoming a more strategic IT department
In this era of business transformations, customer journey / experience initiatives and the continued need to innovate in order to even stay competitive in the digital space, the role of IT becomes more and more crucial. Because of this, it’s a dangerous game for a company to be playing in simply relying on IT to process tickets, fix users’ laptop issues, and ensure the network is in tip top shape. This work undoubtedly still needs doing, but it’s tying up valuable time that could be better spent planning your IT landscape to better meet customer needs and staying ahead of your competitors.
Not sure how to begin taking the plunge?
We appreciate this is a big move – in some ways it feels like IT saying to management that it no longer wants to carry out a core part of its job itself.
But many of our customers have been on this very journey with us – it’s about creating a shift in how you work, your company’s view about IT, and the strategic involvement you have in critical business initiatives. In the modern era, it simply does not cut it for the management team to launch a new initiative and then ask IT how quickly it can be delivered. For businesses to be successful, IT needs to be playing a central role in the development and execution of growth initiatives.
But to do that you need to know that bread and butter stuff is in good hands – you need IT Certainty. And that’s where PAV come in. Our pavASSURE service offers a business IT support service that you can trust and, above all, saves you valuable time.
Click here to see how our services have helped some of our customers to get some breathing space in order to help take the business forward.
