Is your IT strategy preventing business growth?
A business growth strategy incorporates many different elements. From marketing, right through to finance and operations. One important element of a strategy is how your business will implement and make use of IT, which is one area many overlook. Many businesses might think of IT as being just using computers and laptops to get work done, but it’s actually a lot more complex than that.
In this article we discuss why your current IT strategy might be stunting your business growth.
Lack of training across the business
In most organisations, there’ll usually be one person responsible for managing the IT requirements of the whole organisation. But what happens when this person is off sick? Or takes some annual leave?
In this case, it isn’t uncommon to see a dip in productivity and you can be left scratching your heads should a major IT issue occur. This can lead to spending hours fixing issues that could take someone with more knowledge minutes.
By ensuring multiple staff members are trained in IT processes, they can step in when the designated IT person is away. Meaning things can run as smoothly as normal until they return.
People don’t know their role
With multiple teams working on multiple projects together, it can be tricky to know who is doing what, for when and why. It’s often the case that key tasks can get lost in translation too, which can be damaging to productivity.
That’s why it’s important to implement some form of collaboration tool to your teams to ensure everyone has clarity of what’s expected of them. Microsoft Teams is a great example of a tool that does just that.
Processes haven’t been updated
IT is updating constantly. Every month brings new updates, hardware and software changes, which can help speed up your productivity. But if you’re still using the same infrastructure as five years ago, you’ll likely be left behind there too.
Keeping on top of advancements in the industry ensures you can reap the rewards of new tech in the industry. What’s more is, if you keep everything up to date, you don’t have to worry as much about slow connection speeds, or computers that break regularly. If you’re planning a growth strategy, it’s worth putting infrastructure update dates in there too.
Your IT department doesn’t understand your business goals
It can be easy to pigeon hole individual teams to just do their job and go home. If your IT team doesn’t understand how other teams operate and work, they can’t offer support where it’s needed, or recommend new tech advancements which make the team’s job easier.
It’s imperative that any growth plans include members of the IT team to ensure the business is working in synergy with each other.