In this modern world, digitalisation is as expansive as it’s ever been. Technology is also evolving rapidly. For any business to stay ahead, you need to be able to make the most of digitalisation and respond quickly to changing technological trends. By doing so, you’ll be able to address emerging customer expectations and needs, while finding new ways to improve performance and overcome challenges.
If you rely on IT – as basically every business now does – your IT business processes are a core part of this agility. The right IT infrastructure and processes enable you to embrace change, adopt disruptive technology effectively and react faster to a shifting marketplace.
If your IT isn’t set up optimally, you’ll find your business missing out on opportunities, falling behind competitors and running into frustrations. This is why futureproofed IT business processes are key, setting you up for long-term success and agile transitions when needed.
Here are seven things to consider when ensuring IT processes are ready for the future.
1. Resource_
Skills gaps are all too common in the IT industry. Of 500 businesses surveyed, 93% reported a gap in IT skills. This means many businesses already don’t have enough resource to run their IT processes optimally.
This issue is only going to get bigger as your business grows. Do you have enough IT staff to onboard new starters? As your workforce and customer base expands, do you have the capacity to meet rising support demands? Can you keep essential services going?
In most cases, the answer would be to recruit. But with the skills gap in play, it’s difficult for businesses to get the right talent to address the gaps in their IT, guide technology implementation and optimise performance. Often, you can be expected to pay a competitive wage and significant benefits to win over the limited candidates that are available.
As a result, over 60% of businesses report having issues filling IT vacancies in their business.
For futureproofed IT business processes, you need access to sufficient resources. If you can’t recruit the skills you need, this leaves you with two options: train up your existing staff or bring in an external provider to augment your IT team.
Bringing in an external provider is often the most cost-effective of the two, plus it ensures you have good access to IT experts. By having a long-term contract in place, this can serve you as your IT needs evolve.
2. Scalability of systems_
Over time, your business naturally increases in IT users, files and data. You need systems that meet this growing demand, giving you the storage and functionality you need to operate without obstacle. If you have growth plans, this is essential for seamless transition and minimal disruption.
One of the best ways to ensure scalability is to invest in cloud-based systems, as these can dynamically scale resources up or down based on real-time demand, ensuring efficient resource utilisation. Cloud providers typically offer pay-as-you-go storage, which can help you to maintain costs in line with fluctuating demand.
Systems with modular design are also ideal. These have independent modules, allowing for easier updates, modifications and integrations. They can be backed by APIs and open standards to ensure interoperability with other systems and technologies.
By leveraging systems which are built to grow with your business, you can ensure that you’re not held back once your business needs more. This reduces growth barriers and ensures your IT evolves as required.
3. Connectivity_
Connectivity is a key part of system scalability, allowing your business tools to operate in unison. It enables workflows that run between your systems, allowing for increased automation and saving repetitive, manual work.
As demand rises, this prevents manual input rising and draining staff capacity, while maintaining accuracy and quality.
It’s also crucial in today’s data-driven landscape. With connectivity, you can improve data flow between separate systems. This drives visibility between teams, ensuring everyone understands the full business context and can make better decisions. These decisions are critical to optimise your performance and allowing you to be embrace new opportunities.
Finally, systems with good connectivity (such as through APIs and open source) are crucial to embedding new technologies. As you introduce new tools to your tech stack, like AI, it is important that these fit into your IT infrastructure and processes seamlessly. This allows you to get greater value from your solutions and fully embrace cutting-edge innovation.
4. Costs_
It’s a fact of business: costs always rise. However, cost control is also crucial to continuously protect profit and safeguard you in times of economic uncertainty or limited cash flow.
If you don’t control costs, they can quickly spiral, leading you in hardship later and unable to invest in new technology and initiatives.
When it comes to IT, few businesses are operating as cost-efficiently as they could. This largely comes down to vast overheads associated with in-house IT (such as staff costs, energy use, hardware maintenance and more). It’s also coupled with a lack of skills, preventing some businesses from structuring and running IT processes optimally.
The true cost of IT is often hidden, meaning you may not notice creeping fees. If you don’t know how much your IT business processes are really costing you, you can find out with our total cost of ownership calculator.
Making decisive steps to limit costs is crucial to stopping them from growing unreasonably. Outsourcing is also a great solution as it enables you to get the resource, software and support you need, with overheads removed from your business. You just pay a set monthly price, making it a highly cost-effective approach.
5. Security_
Cyber security threats, targeted at businesses, are at an all-time high. And they’re only likely to increase, with AI and automation being used by threat actors to exploit business vulnerabilities for their own financial gains.
To futureproof your business against the incoming barrage of security risks, you need systems will appropriate safeguards. This can include a range of things, such as data encryption, multi-factor authentication, patch management, data backup and more. This should be coupled with specific security software, such as firewalls and antivirus.
More crucially, you need access to cyber security skills. This means having experts in place who can guide your approach to threats, while being responsible for regular processes like threat monitoring and incident response.
Unsurprisingly, the IT skill gaps creeps in again here with 92% of organisations reporting issues. This means many organisations do not have the resource and expertise required for adequate protection.
While AI tools are somewhat remediating this issue, you still need someone responsible for your cyber security. If you don’t have this already, you need to invest in training or consider leveraging external providers.
By having a firm handle on your security posture, you’ll be safeguarded against cyber attacks which could harm reputation and lead to financial loss, especially as the risk level increases.
6. Automation_
Automation has become increasingly popular in recent years. Despite this, businesses still aren’t using it as much as they could, especially as staff report burnout and very limited capacity.
The truth is, with labour shortages, automation is crucial. With limited budgets, businesses often face increasing demand without increasing resource. As this happens alongside your growth, you need automated processes to be able to balance everything and maintain standards.
As you scale, automation prevents the increase of repetitive, manual work which drains resource and frustrates staff. Moreover, it allows you to free capacity and maintain time for high-value work, including predicting and reacting to market trends and business changes.
Investing in systems with built-in automation is useful for boosting productivity. Connected systems will help this even more.
However, it’s also important to examine your IT business processes and find room for automation. For example, anywhere that requires regular manual intervention. By applying automation in these areas, you’ll increase time savings while building processes that deliver consistent quality, even as business circumstances shift.
7. Skills_
We’ve already touched upon the skills gap, but it’s crucial to differentiate between ‘skill’ and ‘resource’. While resource is crucial for keeping processes going and ensuring you have time to do all the things required for effective IT processes, skill is what drives strategy.
Having experts at the helm of your IT is crucial to being able to optimise performance, manage costs, make strong decisions and create plans for embedding technology or making changes.
Without appropriate skills and leaders, you’ll struggle to optimise and innovate your IT, which could lead to inefficiencies and competitor overshadowing. To futureproof, you need to find the right people to fill these roles, whether that is through in-house recruitment or external providers.
You’ll also need to invest in training across your IT staff, so they can become the leaders of tomorrow and ensure you always have access to the expertise you need.
Get ready for the future, today_
If you’re facing issues with your IT that harm your future performance, you’re not alone. Our research report found that this is a common issue across business.
However, all is not lost. Knowing what you need to rectify and making next steps is crucial to creating evergreen IT business processes. While it may require investment and work today, this will pay you tenfold in the years to come.
If you need support in moving forward, we can also help with our managed services packages and IT consultancy services. Whatever it is that your business needs, we can provide the expertise, resource and guidance to optimise your processes, covering the areas of IT support, cyber security, infrastructure, technology implementation and more.
