Most business managers and their IT leaders don’t really have the time to look at the future of the way they handle and use IT. In the current economic climate when many companies are trying to cope with shrinking budgets moving forward with your IT strategy is very low on everyone’s to do list.
These days there is a growing demand for a company’s IT strategy to be run together with top level overall business strategy. Under these circumstances most managers find themselves dealing with urgent priorities rather than important ones as time and budget demands. However, not dealing with long term IT objectives, can create a situation of short term fire fighting
Where issues that keep coming up are never properly addressed or dealt with, often creating differences between the IT department and the rest of the company. Bearing this in mind, it is small wonder that staff members often lack initiative as they become demoralised and customers lost due to IT downtime.
At least fifty percent of companies fail to recognise the negative impacts that IT downtime can have on their overall business. The increase in these problems, if not addressed, could mean significant increases in company losses and costs into the foreseeable future.
If you find yourself fire fighting on a daily basis then you need to hold your breath and stand back for a moment. Take a realistic; overall view of things and you may be able to see a way out of the current problems. Things don’t have to carry on downwards, proactive change, for example temporarily outsourcing some strategic projects could have a significantly positive effect on your day to day business.
Think on some more and it may well be cheaper in the long run to find yourself a committed IT expert and employ them rather than pay agency costs on top of the pay for a temporary worker. If you don’t want the expense of a high salary right now, and if you want to give your existing staff room for promotion, then why not outsource some of the day to day jobs such as database updates and other regular, essential tasks.
There are things for and things against all of the above, but when you really get down to adding up the costs, outsourcing some projects might work out cheaper than hiring someone on a permanent basis. There are no easy answers to these problems, when you think strategically; outsourcing some of the more mundane tasks could be more cost effective.
Don’t forget that the company you choose has a financial interest in doing the job right and even offering extra services, because they want your business. Knowing that the IT side of your business is professionally supported means that you can expect less downtime – which in turn means less of your own and your employees’ valuable time spent fire fighting. When you outsource IT projects to specialists, you have peace of mind without the expense of full time employees.
IT industry leaders can be very critical of their own performance. In general, both business and IT leaders can be more negative about general IT performance than they were in past surveys, a new study from McKinsey states. Specifically though, the IT executives in the survey "scored or judge their own effectiveness in the industry more harshly than their business counterparts do. In comparison with top management and execs from the business side, they are more than twice as likely to suggest replacing IT management as the right solution for their issues."
These are some of the main issues of a new survey of 807 IT businesses and executives, published by Naufal Khan and Johnson Sikes, both with McKinsey. The main point of the report is that cost-cutting is no longer a top IT priority among benefits. There's now a strong emphasis on building the business process and increasing the effectiveness of the IT infrastructure. The bad news, however, is that IT tends to be heading in the opposite direction and being less effective at meeting business goals. Is it because the bar is being set higher for the business aspect of IT?
The survey finds that "improving the effectiveness of business processes" is the top-ranked IT concern at organizations, up from 47 percent in 2011 to 61 percent today. Reducing IT costs has dropped in priority, from 44 percent to 31 percent.
In kind, IT budgets are on the uptake. Approximately up to two-thirds of executives, roughly 64 percent, say their budgets for new investments will go up next year, up from 55 percent who said so in 2012, Khan and Sikes noted. However, executives are evenly split about whether or not operational spending will increase or decrease.
Only forty two percent of IT executives see their departments as being effective at managing their infrastructures, down from forty nine percent in 2012. Only twenty percent feel they are being effective at "pushing technology enablement or innovation in business processes and operations, down from twenty two percent the previous year.
Most of their IT budgets will go toward infrastructure—as they have said since 2010—followed by core transactional applications. Cloud is likely to be a game changer yet to come in this season, however. As Khan and Sikes observe: "Looking ahead three years, executives expect less of their budgets to go to infrastructure, perhaps because infrastructure is the area within IT department where the head count is most likely to have been reduced due to companies’ using cloud-computing technology." The up and comers in the IT scope include analytics and innovation (two very broad terms), projected to get an increased piece of the IT pie in the years to come.
Two-thirds of IT executives report experiencing hardship when seeking the right people with the right skills to get this all done. Accordingly, McKinsey finds, the most acute needs for IT talent are in analytics, joint business and IT expertise, and mobile and online skills. This, of course, varies by industry -- for example, financial-services executives seek enterprise architecture skills, but are less focused on analytics then other industries. Companies engaged in B2C are much more likely to be seeking analytics skills than their B2B counterparts as well.
Conclusion: The exciting news: McKinsey survey observes that cost-cutting is no longer a top IT priority. The not so exciting news: expectations are much higher, with IT seen as less effective at meeting business goals.
Source: http://www.zdnet.com/cutting-it-costs-is-so-2011-7000027742/
With huge competition in the online market, business owners need to be extra cautious while selecting the right IT service provider for their business. Operating and managing business is a daunting task, and this requires special attention. Business owners need to make think twice before hiring IT solution agencies that offer managed IT services NYC to do the job on their behalf. Irrespective of whether a business requires support in one specific area or more comprehensive IT solutions, there would be undeniably one service provider that can surely meet its needs. The firm offering managed IT services will act as a partner to take care of all the IT Solution needs. The basic services may begin with preliminary analysis of the current technical conditions of the company to help the owners make a right decision regarding which services and what level of service they require.
Hiring the best IT service provider would help businesses to get hands on wide range of IT solutions such as network solutions, project management, server administration, help desk support, security and maintenance support and so on. For all those business owners that are unable to manage things like data maintenance, backups, and security etc, there are chances they will face system collapse, which can be fatal for the business and cost them more than they can imagine. Thus, the need to hire IT service providers that can handle all the technical requirements and do away with quick solutions. With help of IT solution firms offering managed IT services in NYC , business owners can get centralized support, 24/7 server monitoring, and preventive maintenance at most affordable price.
Such type of IT services will not cost the business owners a fortune. Most of these IT solution firms offer a wide selection of services that includes alerts, management and monitoring services of the servers, networks as well as applications. Most of these managed IT services are available as remote assistance while some are provided with onsite support if required. Most of these IT services have well organized IT professionals who facilitate planning, coordination and supervisory with best interest of their clients in mind.
Business owners should contemplate on what exactly they require when hiring best IT services. They need to decide on whether they are happy with the way their systems perform. They also need to make out the impact of the system outages and downtown of their company. Having considered all these factors would help them to and their IT solution partners to determine how effectively they can plan out the type of managed IT services in NYC they require. This will also help to build more efficient partnership between the business owner and the IT solutions firm that can handle every minute detail of the company’s IT needs. Ultimately, it is the responsibility of the business owners to take control of their business by using the most effective IT strategies available. So, whether they have a small or large business, hiring best IT services to oversee all their IT requirements would be the smartest and most advantageous decision they could ever make.
IT support has become the most important part of any organization’s infrastructure since information technology has been the main driver of any modern business - and an effective maintenance and management of this service has bearing on the overall efficiency and productivity of the organization. Various studies in this field have revealed that small and medium business enterprises experience a loss of up to 50 hours per employee due to various IT problems.
No organization and especially the SMB’s can afford such kind of losses which are easily preventable if proactive actions are taken and the IT issues are resolved before they even develop into problems. A company would do well to spend the money on upgrading their infrastructure rather than maintaining the existing one. It is only possible if the company recruits a professionally managed IT services group that has the best technicians and latest tools to handle their IT network and maintain it in a manner that ensures maximum efficiency at minimum expense.
With the increase in technology the nature of problems encountered as well the solutions to the same have become very different from before. Nowadays more than 90% of IT related issues are such that they can be resolved though remote access of your machine by the service engineers of your IT management company. This kind of service has great advantages and the most obvious of them is that now for IT support NJ companies do not have to rely entirely on the local IT managers but can choose from a much wider option that includes the service providers from across the world.
With such a large range of choices available, one can select the service which is both economical and effective and which promises to deliver better results while saving big on the maintenance costs. The businesses now have the option to customize the services as per their budget and allocate more funds to enhancing the IT solutions to increase productivity and improve efficiency.
With managed IT services becoming increasingly popular and more companies joining this segment, the field has become quite competitive. This is a very healthy sign for this industry as the competition will result in better services and will also cause a further increase in their demand. By making these services a part of your IT department, you get the facility of real time 24×7 monitoring and support of experts who will be proactively managing your systems and would alert you in case any corrective actions or up gradations on your part are required.
This way you are able to avoid any critical failures and effectively increase the performance of your organization by cutting down on lost man hours and reducing the avoidable interruptions in the operations. Any company or business which has sizeable number of systems and whose functionality is dependent on IT services should seriously consider hiring a well managed and professionally run IT management service provider who can not only take care of their regular maintenance and conflict resolution but also provide proactive solutions to improve efficiency and performance.
