THE CHALLENGE
In the quest to drive business outcomes through digital transformation, IT leaders often reach out to one specific vendor without doing the necessary groundwork. The mission: Get new equipment and IT installed as quickly as possible.
Such an effort can end up being more frustrating than transformative. Without a holistic assessment of business needs and the overall operating environment, the organization might end up procuring a solution that’s incomplete, involves more resources than required, or inadequately supports changes in customer preferences and technological innovation. Furthermore, individual vendors are inherently biased toward their own products and might not offer a technology-agnostic perspective.
This need for a thorough assessment and a comprehensive strategy, before any vendor outreach, spans technology areas and practices.
Consider a company challenged by security risk. A single product may not fully address the threat landscape, and the vendor selling it may not have an in-depth grasp of a specific industry’s regulatory requirements or the technology’s potential shortcomings. And if a solution is chosen to address old issues rather than enable IT modernization, it may become obsolete in mere months.
Organizations considering the cloud risk ending up with applications that need refactoring, insufficient resources for the transition, and contracts that lock them into excess computing capacity.
How can IT leaders avoid wasted resources, insufficient scalability, and solutions that fail to deliver as promised? Develop a strategic roadmap, and enlist an expert guide.
Organizations considering the cloud risk ending up with applications that need refactoring, insufficient resources for the transition, and contracts that lock them into excess computing capacity.
OUR INSIGHTS
With a strategic roadmap to guide technology decisions, organizations can increase their chances of solutions that more closely map to business needs, swifter implementation and adoption, and greater savings and ROI.
Here are some things to consider when creating this roadmap.
Take a look within
Thoroughly assess current resources and infrastructure. How do these match up against organizational challenges and goals? Examine the top concerns related to driving business outcomes. These could include competitive pressures to speed up application development, cost pressures to decrease physical footprints, or budgetary desires to transition large upfront expenditures into payments spread out throughout the year.
Consider financial optimization. This kind of assessment of existing solutions and subscriptions can help organizations identify and leverage features that add value, and reduce spend on unused or underused infrastructure, computing power, or other resources.
Assess the external landscape
Then examine the full universe of possible solutions for what the organization needs to achieve. Start with overall technologies and approaches before delving into individual manufacturers.
Two rising areas are automation and “everything-as-a-service.” An ROI powerhouse, automation can condense a 10-week lead time for application development to mere minutes. Meanwhile, the world is moving to software-defined solutions for networking to WAN and beyond.
In such an evolving environment, the right technology solution involves more than just the right equipment. It demands an overarching strategy.
Enlist an expert guide
IT modernization today involves cloud, security, data centers, and beyond, so you’ll need expertise in all these areas. You’ll need specialists who are able to address complex challenges like scalability and who are ready to work on site. And you’ll need a technology-agnostic view.
When enlisting this expert guide, make sure to look beyond the initial implementation. If you’re considering subscription-based services, think about how you’ll examine license agreements to ensure they’re delivering as promised and that all features are being used to full capability. Here and in other areas, a long-term managed services partner can help, offloading non-core responsibilities today and guiding your organization toward digital transformation tomorrow.
With a strategic roadmap to guide technology decisions, organizations can increase their chances of solutions that more closely map to business needs, swifter implementation and adoption, and greater savings and ROI.
