The New IT
The Worst Case Scenario: Reactive IT
When a pivotal device fails, all hell breaks loose at the office and productivity comes to a screeching halt. It’s the same feeling as when your car engine quits while you’re running late to the airport for your first vacation in months. This is not the best time to sort out who is going to meet your needs – you need a solution as quickly as possible, which makes you vulnerable to exploitation. Because most IT companies give priority responses to their long-term clients, you could be waiting with idle employees and blown deadlines for hours or even days. The solution will be costly, reactive, and entirely dependent on available personnel and equipment. This means more potential damage down the road if the repair is improperly applied or the equipment isn’t a good match for your system. Meanwhile, one of your staff member’s computer doesn’t work in quite the same way with the new device, so her productivity just plummeted, and the “default” tech person in the office hasn’t had a chance to do his actual job in two weeks because he’s been putting out fires for everyone else. Oh, and your clients are on their own deadlines and aren’t particularly interested in why you’re unable to deliver on your contract.
Reframing IT for Your Business
This is how IT becomes a necessary evil at best, or a nightmare expense at worse. It doesn’t have to be this way. Let us help shift your mindset so that actually IT empowers your business and becomes one of your greatest assets. Here are the foundations of your new IT beliefs, and how we achieve them:
New IT Belief #1
Investing in IT develops your business.Achieved By
A Proactive Approach to ITNew IT Belief #2
IT empowers your business and increases productivity.Achieved By
Optimizing your Business through Technology.New IT Belief #3
IT offers a return on your investment.Achieved Through
A Strategic Plan for TechnologyGetting the Most Out of Your Investment
Many of our customers come to us with horror stories like the Worst Case Scenario example. When you’ve been hit in the pocketbook with gauging, unplanned expenses like this, it’s natural to want to rein-in your IT budget. However, investing in your technology on a proactive basis, rather than the reactive model above, will actually stabilize your budget and save money in the long run. This forethought will in-turn enable you to afford systems that power your business, rather than struggling to limp along on the band-aid installed during the last crisis. This is the foundation for our Managed IT Services, which is a requirement for all of our customers. This turns IT into a planned part of your development budget.
Don’t be a victim to technology!
When a failure can take down a company and cause such a panic, people become victims to technology. Many people feel they’re tethered to their tech instead of making it work for them. It’s time to take charge and capitalize on your capabilities. We’re in the business of understanding how you operate, and strategizing what will make your business more money and more functional. Sometimes productivity can be increased with simple and inexpensive solutions, like better internal data structures, enforcing network policy, and standardizing software. Sometimes the right hardware in the right hands can save hours of labor and preserve the mental state of your most valuable people. Whether you know what you want to implement, or you are seeking advice for solutions, it’s time to let IT help your business succeed. Let us make your life easier.
Measuring your return
The last principle, the expectation of technology offering you an ROI, isn’t always easy to quantify. Detailed analysis can certainly indicate when time and money was saved from not having to deal with historic problems like malware and viruses, or employees accessing the internet for personal use, or hardware that eliminated a manual labor component of someone’s job. Yet often the greatest ROIs are those that can’t be measured, like the cost that wasn’t spent on a lawsuit from a security breach, or the compliance requirements that safely protected your customers’ information from theft, or the software that allowed you to offer an entirely new service to your customers. Smooth-IT can assist you with strategic planning that not only ensures your technology pays off, but can help you make even more money and provide better service to your customers going forward.