When is The Right Time for an IT Solution?
When is The Right Time for an IT Solution?
When do business leaders know it’s the right time for an IT solution?
Organisations usually look for an IT solution after they’ve had some kind of problem. That could be a technical issue like downtime, an outage, data loss, or they’re just sick of dealing with all the little issues that happen.
Business leaders come to us and say that it shouldn’t be this hard to run IT in our organisation. They know that there must be a better way to manage IT. And when you dig into it, it typically means that there isn’t a good strategy around IT.
When we ask business leaders how they’ve been managing IT and operating in recent years, we’ll usually find that they haven’t had a strategy. They haven’t been working proactively and doing all the things that they need to do.
And when we look at how we can help, it really starts with that strategy. We establish where the organisation is today and where it’s going. What are the IT challenges? How can we develop a strategy that will get us where we’re trying to go? And as we look at developing an IT strategy, what are some hesitations that executives might have in implementing a new IT solution?
Where to Start with Your IT Solution
There’s often a feeling that taking on a new IT provider, working through the IT roadmap, and developing an IT strategy is an overwhelming task. If you’ve been with your vendor for a long time, even if they’re terrible, they’re what you know.
Companies also fear risk. They fear going backward instead of forward. And these are natural hesitations. Switching IT service providers is a significant change to your business and your comfort level.
You have to either choose to be okay with mediocrity or choose to let go of mediocrity and go for something much better. Mediocrity has a bad habit of sticking around, and business leaders need help understanding how the change gets implemented. That said, changing your service provider can be relatively painless and produce gains almost immediately.
Onboarding a New IT Vendor
Typically, switching to a new vendor isn’t as painful as people think it will be.
When we onboard a new client, the first thing we do is document everything. We look at every piece of technology, hardware, software, vendor, and cloud service in use. And after we’ve documented everything and we’ve logged into everything and we know what we’re dealing with, we can put together a strategy. It involves a lot of time on our side, but it doesn’t really impact the client.
Also, when we have onboarding meetings with new clients, we explain what the next month is going to look like. And at the end of that conversation, they understand our IT solutions. They understand how we’re going to absorb their IT infrastructure and how the IT roadmap will get us there.
They want to know the methodology that we follow and how we’ll achieve it. And at that point, any fear of the process turns to excitement, energy, and enthusiasm.
A Normalized Environment
Once things are going well and we’ve ironed out some of the issues that clients were having with their technology, they usually wonder why they didn’t do this a long time ago.
And they get excited about things that we consider normal. Making a strategy is normal. Having a secure, stable environment is normal, or it should be. These aren’t luxuries that certain businesses enjoy. These are baseline things that your IT vendor should be providing.
The Right Time to Make a Move
CopperTree helps organisations figure out if it’s the right time for a new IT solution by getting to know your business. We need to understand your current relationship with your IT services and identify any pain points that you’re having. We need to know what drove you to the edge of making a decision.
Once you become a client, we go through an onboarding process. We outline what will happen in the next two to four weeks, which involves discussing the business’s needs and analyzing what’s already there. We look for weaknesses, assess the severity of those weaknesses, and lay out a formal IT roadmap.
That roadmap is our strategy for getting to the successful state that we’ve identified. And that target state for your organisation comes from the business leaders. And then we work through how we’re gonna get from where we are now to where we want to be.
That analysis involves a lot of different components. We identify business initiatives that need support. If we find stability issues, we’ll address how to stabilize the system. And we may have some security issues that need to be addressed as well.
What clients want to see in that initial engagement is the plan. And they want to be involved. Business leaders want to tell the IT department where they want to be. Stability and security are critical pieces, but to a business owner, those should be the norm. What they get excited about are the changes coming down, the recommendations we make, and the actions that will facilitate those updates.
Discovering Opportunities with End-Users
In the onboarding process, once we have a documented strategy, we also do one or two weeks of on-site work to document existing systems and infrastructure. That process is critical to find out exactly what you have now.
We go desk to desk and interview your staff to get their perspective on how IT supports their jobs. When users report constant issues with certain aspects of their IT infrastructure, that speaks to stability and security.
When users describe what they want to be able to do, however, that’s the real nugget of gold in an IT strategy. End-users might say it would be great if we could do this, and then connect it to that, which would let us do this. Those notes will be part of an IT solution that drives advantages and drives value to the business.
The onboarding process is really about uncovering opportunities to improve your business. And IT is just the tool we’re using to do that.
Business leaders are often surprised by what we find out when we talk to their users. There’s a perception that they know what’s going on. They know their organisation’s needs and challenges. But when you talk to the users and dig into how they work, we often find things that are somewhat surprising.
Finding The Best IT Solution for Your Target State
When we deliver a formal roadmap, we go over findings and we’ve already discussed the target state at this meeting. They already know that because they really define what we need to get to. But when we go over recommendations or suggestions from users, they’re often surprised.
Sometimes users don’t know how to tell a superior in their organisation that a process doesn’t work. And sometimes people create solutions on their own to solve a particular problem or produce the results that their immediate supervisor needs.
Let’s say your supervisor asks you to achieve a goal and you have no idea how to do it. You find or create a solution, which shows initiative, and that becomes the standard. But an outside person might come in and say that that task, which takes two hours a week, should take five minutes a week. Or you shouldn’t even be doing that because someone in another department does most of that work already. You don’t know that someone else already has that piece of information that you need.
The Right IT Solution Supports Different Functions
It takes time to understand how IT solutions support different business functions. And you can’t uncover these things if you’re doing sales, or marketing, otherwise running a business. You need to make space. That’s what we provide. We provide the space to look at your business and how it interacts with IT.
When we make recommendations, business leaders are often surprised by how simple they are. If you do this and this, you’ll see immediate gains. That said, sometimes the complexity of the recommendations is surprising because they come from a deeper understanding of how different people within your organisation relate to IT and relate to each other.
There are so many “aha” moments during these roadmap presentation meetings. And some of them are good and some of them, unfortunately, are bad. But if you discover that something isn’t working the way you thought it would, that’s the point of the process. If there’s a weakness, let’s uncover it. If there’s an opportunity, tell us what it is. But you can’t make something better if you don’t know what’s available to make it better.
The end result of this process, and of using CopperTree services, goes back to what business leaders want from technology in the first place. And everybody says that they just want everything to work. They want to sleep at night knowing that their risks are managed and that the right technology is in place to support the business.
When we come in, we take the time to understand your business and understand your goals. We put all of that into the strategy, and then we put the strategy to work. Once we know where we are and where we’re going, we can implement solutions and changes that will help you achieve your goals.
