Growing your business today means investing in new IT. Rapid advancements in accessibility, usefulness, and efficiencies of IT devices, software, and infrastructure brings constant opportunities for improving your business. Accelerating your growth with new IT takes careful planning, a deep understanding of your business, and a willingness to try new things. Here’s how to maximize your IT investment.
Start small and invest in what your business needs most. One of the biggest mistakes a company can make is to implement a new technology because it is the shiny new object everyone is talking about. If your transformation isn’t tied to your business objectives, and if the staff doesn’t understand the solutions they are using, frustration sets in and frequently everyone reverts to doing things the old way. Develop a strategy and roadmap that takes your current and future goals into account.
You can invest in large platforms like Microsoft 365, but you don’t need to add every application to your stack immediately. Start with familiar programs like Outlook and Excel and only add on one or two new programs at a time. For example, team collaboration may be a priority with your staff spread across offices and remote work. Implement Microsoft Teams to engage collaboration tools and secure video chatting.
Focus on unlocking value, not just savings. A lot of providers promise that new tech will save you money. While long-term operating costs are frequently reduced, the best return is in increased efficiency and productivity across your business. If transitioning to a cloud-based platform or solution, often not having to maintain on-premises servers and having the ability to easily scale storage, bandwidth, and users up and down is a far better value over legacy applications. To get the most value from any new technology, you must plan your implementation across people, processes, and culture. A new platform without changed behaviors will not move your business forward. Transformative technology enables you to boost revenues and profits, which means the total cost-benefit goes beyond any savings.
Make simplification a core principle. Without a governing IT roadmap, it’s easy to add more and more tools over time, many of which don’t speak to each other and only satisfy one process or user need. These kinds of complex technology stacks are hard to manage, open you up to cyber and privacy risks, and are costly to maintain. Any new technology being considered needs to be assessed with your current stack. Look for redundancies in other assets that could be replaced and check on integration opportunities with other current assets to ensure a seamless and simplified technology stack.
Commit to the journey. Transformations do not happen overnight. It will take time to implement every feature a new platform offers, especially as most cloud-based solutions are constantly evolving and adding new functionality. As your staff buys into new processes and your company grows, new features can be implemented to fully leverage the value of platforms.
You do not need to tackle IT investment and implementation on your own. Consider working with an implementation partner. Pearl Solutions Group is committed to understanding your business and helping you build and maintain IT that works best for your objectives and staff. In addition to our expertise, we work with leading IT platform, device, and software companies like Microsoft, Panasonic, and Lenovo to provide you with strategic and efficient IT and happier, more productive teams.
