– Rich Recchio, Marketing Manager at Caronet, says:
The Importance of an IT Strategy
With IT technology playing a major role in the evolution of business today, it’s hard to imagine that businesses would fall short or neglect preparing for the future of their IT approach. Surprisingly enough, a majority of businesses in today’s world lack a solid IT strategy. Many businesses fall into the category of, “if it’s not an issue now, then don’t worry about it.” However, waiting to recognize the significance of future trends, issues and obstacles presented to your company will result in creating IT strategies ad hoc and position your company further behind the ball or worse, beat to an emerging market by a competitor.
According to a recent Cloud Security Alliance report, only 28% of American financial companies currently have an existing cloud strategy. While this is just one industry and only pertaining to a cloud strategy, it’s still an alarming percentage considering that more and more companies are moving towards implementing cloud solutions in some way across their IT infrastructure. Even though cloud solutions are becoming popular among many companies and industries, the question at hand is, are they moving pieces of their IT infrastructure to the cloud because that was part of their IT strategy or are they trying to catch up with trends and issues facing their companies today?
By creating and implementing an IT strategy, it will ensure that you’re aligning your business with future trends that can provide a competitive advantage against competitors as well as optimize revenue and profits. IT strategies are no easy feat though; it takes individuals across multiple departments within an organization to truly have an effective IT strategy. According to a recent IBM report, only 30% of organizations effectively collaborate with the business to provide IT infrastructure solutions to support their business needs. The collaboration between business executives and IT leaders allows organizations to effectively position themselves in regards to customer needs and wants, employee productivity, and technology trends and advancements.
Prospects become customers because at the initial stage of engagement your company had the technology or solution that was needed to satisfy their needs and requirements. Meeting customer expectations is the defining point between retaining or losing a customer. With an IT strategy in place, organizations are positioning themselves to be agile, secure and scalable in order to grow with and support their customer base.
Knowing where the future of technology is headed, customer needs, or what the next trend will be in your industry will always have a presence of the unknown. However, business leaders and IT leaders can collaborate together to better understand their markets and allow their organizations to be better equipped for the future and position themselves to be the leaders in their industries.
Rich Recchio, Marketing Manager at Caronet – http://www.linkedin.com/in/richrecchio
