Is your tech organization in a state of chaos? If so, don’t fret. You aren’t underperforming; you’re typical. IT staffs are constantly fighting challenges including disparate systems that don’t work together, ever changing demands from the business, and threats from outside actors while keeping current systems operational and implementing the new technology necessary to prepare the business for the future.
Bringing that chaos under control means CIOs need to get proactive. You need to use tools to manage the network you have, plan for the future infrastructure you need, and work closely with your end users to drive a digital transformation and leverage your technical infrastructure to best deliver business value.
Manage the Network You Have
You’ll never overcome chaos if you don’t understand your current environment. Use an infrastructure assessment to identify the problems that your team needs to address now. Once you know the issues, you can prioritize them and come up with a plan and budget to tackle them. Recognize that managing your network is an ongoing process, so you’ll want to implement monitoring tools and automation to make sure your new and improved infrastructure maintains its high performance and security level.
Plan for the Future Infrastructure You Need
Once your current environment is running smoothly—when you no longer have a daily crisis meeting on your calendar—you can start planning for the future. You’ll want to assess the business strategy and correlate it with your technical strategy, but you need to find a balance. Business and technology can both change rapidly these days, so you don’t want to get locked in. Using cloud technology lets you adapt to changing needs and avoids massive capital expenditures.
Become an Equal Partner in Your Business Relationships
Working closely with your end users is the key to technology success and effective implementation of a technology plan. And while the tech team needs to be in service to the business, that doesn’t mean you’re the junior partner in the relationship. Today, technology managers need to be equal partners with their business counterparts. You need to bring a vision of how technology can do more than just support the business in achieving its goals; you need to help the business understand how it can be transformed by technology to create and deliver its products in entirely new ways. This means you need to spend time understanding business processes and business strategies as well as new technical development.
Work With an Expert IT Team
The pace of technology change is far too rapid for any one person to keep up with it all, and few companies have enough internal resources to both meet current demands and plan for the future. Working with an expert IT consulting firm lets businesses bring in experts who can help them tackle the challenge of being proactive.
Prescient Solutions has nearly 20 years’ experience helping our clients achieve their technical goals. Our certified experts’ knowledge of networks, operating systems, cloud and virtualization, information security, and other technologies enables us to bring insight to your challenges and help you identify your path forward. Contact us for a free infrastructure assessment that will help you become proactive in your IT management strategy and solutions.
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