New Year’s Resolutions For IT and How To Make Them Stick
Here Are a Couple Of Popular New Year’s Resolutions Tailored For IT And Some Ideas To Make Them Stick In 2019 and Beyond.
Get Fit
No pain. No gain. It’s time to get the work environment into shape. Fortunately, this exercise routine does not require a new gym membership, but it might require subscribing to a new mindset to shift things into gear.
For IT getting fit is akin to becoming operationally lean and efficient. By first identifying patterns of inefficient workflows and processes, IT can arm itself with insights to design a viable roadmap towards efficiency. Through a discovery process, IT can uncover technology gaps, data silos, and other areas of improvement that are causing inefficiencies and devise a strategy, process, and implement technologies that support the end goal.
Reinvent Yourself
As the pace of digital disruption continues to increase, IT is being forced to reinvent itself and rethink the use of important technologies to keep up. Shifting towards IT as a service, can help IT scale, optimize output, and meet business objectives faster and more effectively. According to a recent post, there are emergent solutions that offer the advantage of the public cloud and the option to run workloads on-premise. “These solutions allow companies to consume IT capacity as needed, save money by scaling IT resources up or down as the business needs them, and benefit from the helping hand of a trusted IT services organization.”
This hybrid IT infrastructure enables IT to become an agile technology partner to the business side of their organization. “A move from buy-and-build IT in the traditional sense to consuming IT on premises with a Hybrid IT infrastructure brings some significant benefits.”
Ideas To Get Started
Start With Data
Analyze your data to assess the existing infrastructure. You’ll gain a clear picture of what needs further automation, discover opportunities for improving efficiency and accurately calculate budget allocation.
Seek Stakeholder Buy-In
Becoming lean and efficient saves time and money in the long run, but in the short term it often requires substantial overhead. A data-driven plan that illustrates ROI can help get approval from decision makers who might normally get spooked by large numbers.
Automate What Works
Once you have buy-in, automate as many of the processes that already work. This might require hiring new programming talent or service partners that have substantial experience. From there, dedicate remaining resources to assessing and correcting the remaining processes and preparing a service operations roadmap.
Make It Stick
For IT professionals who are often stretched thin with everyday tasks there’s little bandwidth and time to implement efficiency strategies. But this doesn’t lessen the urgency to do so. A technology partner can provide expertise, strategic advice, and additional human resources to design and implement a program to improve efficiency, and make the IT new year’s resolutions stick.