The Guide to Digital Success - Status Quo

Everyone has a digital strategy, but not everyone knows how they best can realize it, with as few hiccups and challenges as possible. The strategy often includes the right words like “cloud, AI, automation etc. But where do you begin? It's not just moving your business to the cloud or implementing a new application. 

Let's take it from the start. Here are two common scenarios for many businesses today:

#1 The ones that have outsourced their IT
Many customers contacting us have an outsourcing IT strategy. Not surprising since this is what 60% of SMBs in Scandinavia do. 

The most common and painful challenge is lack of innovation and proactiveness from their existing IT vendor/supplier/service provider. Customers often find that their IT supplier lacks not only the will but also the knowledge to support them towards a more efficient and modern IT platform. Being tied up in contracts that may be as long as 5 years, makes it hard to push for a change towards more modern IT and cloud solutions.  

Another pain is the aspect of cost control. Not really knowing what they are paying for makes it hard to drill down into the actual cost of the different services they are utilizing. They may also experience an uncertainty related to change, for instance an upgrade of SQL for their HR system. This will in most cases result in a high one-time cost for the change projects and is almost impossible to predict. 

#2 The ones that maintain their own internal IT

What we most often see with companies maintaining their own internal IT is that they have competent and eager IT personnel who really want to improve the IT processes for their end user, but they have their hands tied up in old-fashioned firefighting. 

They spend a lot of time on manual processes like setting up new PCs, patching, updates or changing disks in the server room. They lack modern monitoring and surveillance solutions, so they lose important intelligence. This make it hard to be proactive towards IT incidents leading to downtime of IT services and frustrated end users.  

This endless firefighting leads to the internal IT department only having time for reactive tasks, and having no time for being proactive, process improvement and driving user adoption.

Ask yourself this: What does your status quo look like and are you happy with it? And is this something your business will benefit from in the years to come?
 

We will follow this up next week with: 3 important things to have in mind before take-off.