There are many motivators that can fuel the desire to grow your company. Most businesses would like to increase profits and beat their competitors. Some may want to enter a new market or create a new profit center. Others want to become industry innovators or offer more products and services to their current customer base.
The road to achievement of these goals can vary from industry to industry, and company to company, but more and more businesses are finding that the inclusion of Information and Technology into their growth strategy connects their vision of transformation with their path to success.
Before you can utilize IT as a contributor to your growth, it's helpful to assess your current situation as well as your company's attitudes. Surprisingly, many companies perceive normal as a constant stream of issues and breakdowns. Their IT resources, whether internal or outsourced, struggle to keep up and technology is a headache as well as a large piece of overhead. Other businesses do better with day-to-day operations and see technology as a tool for their employees to get work done but they haven't quite connected with how its functions enable the company to better meet customer needs.
Whatever your goals are for your organization, the core of your mission as a business is probably to meet customer needs. Technology is increasingly playing a part in how this is accomplished.
Not only are your employees technically savvy, your customers are, too, and their behavior and expectations have changed because of it. "Customer Experience" is not just a term that applies to consumers. In B2B settings this includes how you interact with customers, and how you provide them with the real time data that they need, in turn, to meet the needs of their customers.
Effective business processes don't magically appear as a result of the use of technology. They are built on a good plan that lays out a solid infrastructure that is right for the business. Because of this, it's impossible to apply a one size fits all approach to technology planning and management. The way that the components of the infrastructure are brought together -- including software, hardare, data handling, security, communications and management -- are going to enable employees to work productively, to efficiently meet customer needs, and scale with the business as it grows.
Companies that have a reliable infrastructure soon see that they can leverage IT in ways that weren't previously possible. They find themselves happily moving past the "support" mentality and begin to think more strategically about how they can use IT to meet their business goals. They realize that it becomes possible to increase their company's abilities, to be a stronger competitor, and to deliver more value to their customers by making technology decisions that are both innovative and sustainable.
The transformation of your IT from an isolated piece of your business operation to a strategic contributor to your growth takes expertise. IT is increasingly complex and it is difficult, if not impossible, to get all of the skills and knowledge that are needed to create a mature IT environment under your own roof.
More and more businesses are partnering with IT managed services companies because they recognize that it is the most cost effective way to get the IT resources that they need to break free from the break/fix mentality and focus on what they do best.
Thriveon helps companies with 20 - 500 companies go from where they are today, to where they want to be tomorrow by providing business level IT guidance and outsourced IT department services, all for a fixed monthly fee. We would like to explore with you how our proven process to business success can be applied to your unique needs and situation, Contact us to schedule a meeting.
