Several key aspects make up a successful business in the modern age. Still, undoubtedly one of the most crucial is IT. This is simple – society is increasingly centered around digital environments, which means businesses converge online.
While this is hardly breaking news, it is worth considering when you are next deciding where to allocate funding within your organization. The health of your IT infrastructure can have a huge bearing on the overall performance of your business – and your commercial success.
For example, if your employees are being slowed down daily by an overly complicated online workflow, your productivity will nosedive. On the other hand, if your integral IT structure is flawed or outdated, your growth may be stunted until you rebuild it.
As a result, you need to constantly search for new ways to improve your IT capability if you are to scale your business and maintain its health and vitality. To help you target common problem areas, here are three tips on how to boost your IT capability:
Overhaul your IT structure
One of the most fundamental ways you can improve your IT capability is to overhaul your entire IT structure. By doing this, you are essentially treating your IT department like a mechanical toy – deconstructing it to see how it functions and then putting it back together better than before. Of course, to continue with the mechanical analogy, you don’t want to risk tearing your IT structure apart only to break what was working and struggle to reconstruct it.
Therefore, you need to have a clear plan of action before you start pointing fingers or making sweeping changes. For example, a good idea before you restructure your IT department is to know what changes you are going to make – such as implementing a microservices infrastructure.
Build an internal IT department
If you are a company that relies upon third-party partners to provide your IT capability, then it might be time to consider investing in your own internal IT department.
There are many benefits and drawbacks attached to creating your own internal IT department. Still, ultimately it is in your best interests if you want to scale your company and improve efficiency. The reason for this is simple. When your IT team is internal, you can easily keep track of them, call on them to complete urgent tasks, and work with them to increase their efficiency.
Moreover, your team will only ever work on your systems, which means they will become accustomed to your company ethos and workflows, making it easier for them to find the right solutions for your organization.
However, it is worth remembering that hiring an internal team is only beneficial when you have made the department as streamlined as possible. Simply hiring a huge team for the sake of it will only ever slow down your business.
Use your IT to stimulate business growth
Like every department in your company, IT should be designed from the outset to stimulate business growth, not to detract from it. As we have already referenced, having a large and cumbersome team is going to slow you down if you don’t know how to manage them properly. Therefore, you need to actively set your IT team the target of finding ways to improve digital efficiency and business growth. This will help you identify easy wins and scale faster.
