The dangers of no IT strategy are real.

IT isn’t a leading concern for many business owners until it becomes a problem. It’s something that they would rather not address because they might not enjoy it, or they may not fully understand it. If you can avoid dealing with IT because it’s working properly, then you may be fine.

If you ignore it, however, you can accumulate a large amount of technical debt. Even if your IT has been working perfectly for a while, and you aren’t doing maintenance, you will eventually have problems.

If you are careless about the health of your IT, one day you’ll find yourself in a situation where you need to make large changes and something will break. Then, you’ll realize that you’ll have to make a big investment that you didn’t plan for.

Avoiding Unplanned IT Spending

The best way to avoid that situation is to have a good IT strategy in place.

We were talking to an organization recently that thought things were going pretty well. Their infrastructure seemed to be working okay, and they felt like they had the right technology in place for the most part.

But they didn’t feel good about their IT strategy. They didn’t feel comfortable with their vendor’s approach to strategic planning; which made them feel that they were not making any progress.

They’d asked for things that didn’t happen, and they had been talking about the same baseline initiatives for a long time. And they felt like every time their vendor agreed to move forward with something; they were still talking about the same things three to four months later.

We’ve found this sentiment to be fairly typical among business leaders. If you don’t have the right partner, if you don’t have somebody who truly understands the business side and the technology side, you’re not really making any progress. This lack of strategy will stunt your progress from an IT perspective.

How Do Organizations Put an Effective IT Strategy in Place?

The best way to make sure you have a good IT strategy is to work with a proactive, forward-thinking provider.

That might be an IT partner or an internal person who is responsible for IT. They need to understand your business goals and your technology. And they need to ensure that your organization is supported with the right technology.

Keeping Your Business On Track

The technical components, of course, are essential. Someone needs to look at your infrastructure monthly to ensure everything is set up and working properly.

But there’s a more business-focused process too. You should sit down once a quarter or so to review your business strategy and discuss questions like:

• Where are we going as an organization?
• How is technology serving us as we go down that path?
• Is technology supporting our organization in achieving our goals?

No IT Strategy Creates Technical Debt

One of the benefits of a sound IT strategy is avoiding that IT technical debt. Technical debt is an accumulation of problems you don’t know about or didn’t plan for that need to be addressed quickly.

In other words, when you ignore your IT systems for a while, you’ll eventually find that you need to change many things and spend a bunch of money. But a sound IT strategy will prevent the need for that. 

Part of the CopperTree process is sitting with our clients quarterly to review their IT strategy because we understand where the business is going ahead of time. We know about the things coming down the pipe, any changes or new challenges the business is running into, and we look for ways to leverage technology to solve those problems. Our goal is to make sure that there are no surprises.

Server Updates with No IT Strategy

You should not only discover that your servers are due for a refresh or accidentally when they cause problems and risks to your infrastructure and your business. That’s something that you should know about months or years in advance.

Most of the time, servers need to be replaced every five years. It’s not a surprise when they turn five years old, and you need to make changes.

We always try to get our clients to a point where everything just works. You should have peace of mind and know that your infrastructure is secure and functional when you get to work in the morning.

We do that by constantly evaluating your infrastructure against our best practices and making incremental changes to your infrastructure.

Our approach to IT is proactive. We look every month, or every quarter, for ways to make improvements. We ensure you can make small, incremental changes over the years rather than changing everything and then doing nothing for four or five years.

A proactive approach tends to create a much better business experience. And it’s much less disruptive if you’re making minor tweaks behind the scenes rather than changing everything and having everybody relearn your systems again.

We also make sure that you have the right technology in place. If there are new tools that you can leverage to optimize your workflows or if there are systems that you could use to improve your communication or collaboration with your clients, we want you to know about them. Somebody needs to bring that to your attention, and that’s what CopperTree does.

Lacking IT Strategy? 

By Working with Coppertree Solutions we can provide effective IT solutions and strategies to get you back on track to success. Click here to contact us to schedule your assessment right away!