Introduction
An IT strategy is a detailed document that elaborates a company’s vision and strategic planning for IT. It generally includes budgeting, strategy documents, and operating models for the future of its technology architecture.
A robust IT strategy is essential to ensure that your business gets the best value from technology. Organizations can reduce costs, increase productivity, enhance customer retention, and have a loyal employee base with the correct IT strategy.
However, many businesses suffer from an outdated and haphazard approach to their IT, which can be a major drain on profits. This blog will look at five ways a robust IT strategy can help boost bottom-line performance for your business.
The importance and benefits of a well laid out IT strategy
In the present world, IT solutions are essential for every business to create new products, services, and even new business models and opportunities. Crucial components like enhancing customer experience, providing customer service, boosting sales, improving employee productivity, and interaction with stakeholders within and outside the organization are made possible through business technology solutions.
With the recent focus on digital transformation, having a robust IT strategy has become even more important for businesses worldwide. As such, companies must consider creating and following an IT strategy to accomplish the most out of their technology.
IT consulting firms worldwide have observed that businesses spend a major chunk of their IT budgets on enterprise applications such as business intelligence, demand forecasting, marketing, customer service, and logistics. These demands are driven by individual business units that may need new software but might lack the bigger picture.
Overworked IT departments tend to quickly approve and execute ad-hoc projects that may or may not fulfill the long-term IT objectives of a company. There is a need for a comprehensive IT strategy to proactively steer the strategic use of technology within a company as a reactive approach is ineffective and, at worst, detrimental to a company’s growth.
Here are a few pointers to demonstrate the importance and ROI benefits of creating an IT strategy as an organization-wide effort –
- It gives you a unified approach to processing and sharing information across the organization for maximum efficiency, minimum duplication, better collaboration, and less chance of errors.
- It helps with data collection and processing, governance, and analytics. New IT solutions that use AI and big data for business intelligence require large volumes of reliable data for accurate insights and having an IT strategy maps out a way to acquire and facilitate that data.
- It helps you protect your customer’s and employee data by giving you a holistic approach to cybersecurity. This is crucial for businesses in a regulated industry, where complying with security standards is a necessity.
- It helps with improved communication between IT and various other departments within the organization, which helps with better executive alignment. Stakeholder buy-ins for IT initiatives become easier due to better communication, leading to a better overall strategy and business processes.
- IT helps fortify your organization’s IT infrastructure, build IT resilience, and thus minimize spending due to extended downtime. Better resource allocation and project planning and management is also a benefactor that helps with prioritizing long-term benefits for the organization.
Most businesses already have an IT team in place, but the team is preoccupied with day-to-day tasks of maintaining and management. Tackling additional IT projects often leads to the stretching of resources. Companies should appoint a Chief Information Officer (CIO) to lead all such IT-related strategic activities to ensure that long-term strategic technology decisions are not overlooked and made in haste.
In-house IT teams are resourceful, competent, and experienced to lead IT strategies. However, they will need additional support during the critical stages of designing and implementing a comprehensive IT strategy. Hence, it is prudent to outsource support from an IT consulting services agency to help you fine-tune your IT strategy and off-load the daily maintenance tasks. This will spare you time for focusing on high-level objectives and IT initiatives.
It is highly recommended that you get your IT strategy or project plan reviewed by an IT consulting firm so that your organization can support both new and existing IT initiatives without any bottlenecks. Doing this will give you a competitive edge over your competitors!
