Many IT organisations struggle to maintain appropriate service levels as the organisation changes through mergers, acquisitions, and demergers. If unchecked,...
The Importance of Strategic IT Planning
There is never a good excuse for IT management not having a formally documented IT Plan or Strategic Roadmap. We often find that organizations operating
without an appropriate IT plan are unable to engage in sufficient levels of proactive management. Instead they take on a fire fighting mentality which leads to
increased levels of risk, operating inefficiencies and ultimately poor outcomes for the business.
Symptoms of poor, or absent, IT planning include:
- Reactionary rather than preventative attitude towards problem fixing
- Ongoing infrastructure capacity constraints
- Inefficient use of capital and operational funds
- No capacity to provide evidence that supports critical budget or project requests
- Extended leadtimes to simple business requests
- Defensive attitude of IT help desk staff
- Use of undefined “Security Concerns” as excuse for inaction
- Business units making technology decisions without the involvement of IT
- The “resource crunch” – no time to do the job properly
- Poorly aligned IT policies that impact the efficiency of the business
- Loss of executive management “faith” in IT service delivery
A good quality IT plan will help management to find the right balance between business usual activities and the planned projects that deliver enhancements to services and capabilities. It can also be used as a tool to unlock funding from the business that enables key IT initiatives that would otherwise remain underfunded and undeployable.
How Can Beyond Technology Help?
We specialise in aligning business requirements to technology solutions and creating realistic IT plans is a core part of this process. All of our engagements are unique as we tailor each project to clients exacting needs. We can help organisations across the three key areas of IT Planning:
Develop
It is not uncommon for immature IT organisations to manage day to day operations without a formal IT Plan being in place without obviously impacting on service delivery to the business.
However, in reality these organisations are living with unacceptable risks of infrastructure that is inappropriate for purpose. Their ability to react and refocus is significantly limited and without resource planning, justification for additional investment can only be based on pleas and fear.
Enhance
Business requirements are always changing and when this is coupled with the fast pace of technology development, the goal of making the right technology infrastructure and applicatoin choices can be huge challenge.
We can help you to plan out when enhanced infrastructure capabilities and new business applications are required, and understand the implications, both financial and operational, of deploying them. This will therefore ensure that IT service delivery will grow to meet the changing needs of the business without the risk of service level failure.
Align
If IT Plans are not aligned to the business it is highly likely that the organisation will be facing the increased costs and risks associated with a poorly optimised IT entity. We can assist you to uncover the expected and future demand from the business to enable the IT strategy to be aligned for more efficient delivery. The emphasis here is to ensure appropriate IT decisions are made that are in the best interests of the organisation as a whole.
Our experience as business focused technology experts places us in a unique position to be able to deliver to you the key insights required in the IT Planning process. Our consultants have helped a number of organisations with their IT Planning and if you would like to know more about how we could help your organisation please contact us.
After you identified the root cause of our difficulties we have never looked back”CFO | Financial Services Industry
I was astounded to see how reprioritising our IT could deliver such a material improvement in business outcomes”MD | Large field services organisation
It’s the first time that I clearly understand how we engage our IT to change the status quo”CEO | Large Professional Services Firm
Reading your report produced without conflict-of-interest, I clearly understand how biased previous technology advice had been”CEO | Not-for-Profit Organisation
Our business outcomes
Beyond Technology advise businesses on how to optimise the use of IT to achieve business outcomes.
Beyond Technology Consulting has several ways to help CFO’s and CIO’s to improve their organisation’s balance sheet. Our consultants are highly skilled in identifying how to optimise your IT costs to ensure that you are taking advantage of the technology available to your organisation.
Many organisations carry a significant IT failure risk without understanding either the potential or consequences of failure. Quantifying the latent risk, and taking steps to mitigate it not only makes good business sense, it often provides significant improvement in the efficiency and availability of “business as usual” IT service.
With the growing demands on IT departments it can be all too easy to focus on rapidly expanding capability and addressing the day-to-day challenges of running the technology. Properly aligning IT to direct business requirements, while improving the communication channels between IT and the business delivers massive efficiency and capability improvements.
Digital and Technology enablement is critical to all business's growth plans, and without appropriate IT foundations and planning your growth journey will be lost at sea. Aligning your technology planning to your business strategy and ensuring appropriate priority is given to future enablement projects makes a decisive difference to your business growth plans.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Can’t find what you’re looking for? Drop us a line and we’d be happy to answers any questions you have.
In most professions where information is asymmetric (i.e. the professional could take advantage of knowing more about the subject that they are advising you on) such as Lawyers and Doctors, the governing body can deregister the professional as stop them from practicing. This does not happen with Technology professionals so conflict of interest is a critical problem. Similarly when a technologist is heavily invested in one specific technology it often becomes their go-to solution (to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail). By Maintaining our independence, Beyond Technology Consulting ensures that you are provided with unbiased and actionable advice that you can trust is free from conflict of interest and be assured that we are not monetising the advice that we provide you.
"Actionable Advice" is accessible, accurate and is advice that is provided in a language and manner that does not require technical qualifications to understand. We ensure that our recommendations are fit-for-purpose with an understanding of the context of your organisation to be both affordable and achievable.
We focus on understanding the core requirements of the business so that our advice is based on your requirements not the avaliable technology. This ensures that you don't end up with a solution looking for a problem and ensures that technology outcomes will grow with your business and flex with changes in the technology.
We focus on understanding the core requirements of the business so that our advice is based on your requirements not the avaliable technology. This combined with a bias towards flexible technology solutions helps to provide technology outcomes that will grow with your business and flex with changes in the technology.
There are two key reasons that organisations don't undertake regular independent technology reviews. Firstly many boards and executive don't know that organisations like Beyond Technology Consulting exist and they are left thinking that the only options are IT Audits that are provided by the big accounting firms that don't provide any answers or actionable advice. The second reason is that they don't feel that they understand enough about IT to be able to get value from a review. Beyond Technology Consulting understands this and have designed our organisation to provide "Actionable Advice" that is accessible, accurate and provided in a language and manner that does not require technical qualifications to understand.
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Evidence of the outcomes we have achieved
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