How to Free Up IT Resources
Business success comes from capitalizing on opportunities, except it is harder to do so if you are resource constrained. This article explores ways to free up IT resources to drive productivity and evolution.
Your business depends on information technology resources. The right software can help manage expanding workloads and improve collaboration. Enjoy reliable, secure access to innovate and grow your business with appropriate hardware.
Yet you are probably operating at the edge of your IT capabilities. IT teams get overwhelmed with routine and mundane tasks. At the same time, the shortage of skilled IT experts hinders any attempts to hire more staff.
The answer to this problem? Taking a fresh look at existing IT infrastructure and business processes. Doing things "the way we've always done" works well for family holidays, but getting stuck in a rut with IT can mean missing out on technology value add.
Steps to Take to Free up IT
Meet with managers and individual employees to review the way you're doing things. Do they still need to be done that way? With artificial intelligence and machine learning, you might automate the routine, everyday tasks.
You might be able to drop the human element of a task entirely or at least find a way to optimize a decades-old process or manual procedure. For example, business collaboration software offers file sharing and editing convenience. There's no longer a need to print things out or email documents around the office.
Check the app store for your office software to see what new innovations could lighten workload. To start, there are many time-management tools available to optimize employee work.
Your business could also be due a hardware update. The business desktops could be doing OK, yet you could be wasting time waiting for an older computer to load up an application, or losing valuable time to a slow server or underperforming network. It may be only a few minutes on a given day, but multiply that across the work week, over the year, and that lost productivity adds up.
The Value of IT Outsourcing
There are several ways you can outsource IT to free up your on-site resources. For one, you might look at your existing infrastructure. Do you need to have that hulking hardware taking up space in the work environment? With so many cloud services available, your business could outsource its infrastructure. This lets you reclaim valuable real estate and cut utility expenses, plus, you hand technology maintenance and management off to a skilled third party.
Instead of your IT team performing time-consuming daily backups, investigate cloud-based data backup. The automated alternative lets employees focus on adding business value instead.
Hiring a managed service provider (MSP) to take on IT tasks also frees up on-site IT resources. An external IT expert taking a new look at your infrastructure may find better solutions, or integrations that do more with your already established software and hardware.
Business IT should facilitate growth. Take the time to re-evaluate your technology needs. Intentionally allocate tech resources. With an MSP's expert backup, you can reduce costs and streamline operations. Freeing up IT resources also allows your IT team to focus on better enabling your core business.
