Planning is essential to your business, especially if you want to avoid overspending. IT is certainly not the exception to this rule.
Some IT costs spring up for companies as a total surprise, like equipment breakdowns. But, these expenses can be minimized or mitigated with proper planning.
Take a look at these 3 ways planning matters to your IT costs:
- Develop a strategic roadmap. Everything that you can think of doing in a business has technology ramifications. At Connecting Point, we assign a business consultant to every client for this reason. Our consultant sits down with the company’s management team to discuss the business direction for the next 3 years. From this, we create a living document we call the technology roadmap.
Whatever is planned in the business is now planned for from a technology perspective as well. When a company plans for growth, for instance, the new employees are all going to need new laptops, applications, phones, etc. Putting it on the roadmap helps you better accommodate the technology costs associated with your plans so you know exactly what you’re getting into.
- Be certain about your needs. It’s easy to misjudge what you actually need for your technology. For instance, with the reliance on technology and a more cloud-centric business landscape, people are more dependent on internet connections for just about everything. Plus, each employee often has multiple devices connecting to your network, which can crowd out your bandwidth.
Without careful planning, you could wind up not having enough service to accommodate your technology. When one of our clients decided to get their own internet service while we were setting up their infrastructure, they didn’t get enough bandwidth. As a result, on their grand opening day, they had no internet connection or phones.
- Plan for failure. Technology will fail at some point, and you need to plan for this so you can avoid it taking down your company. By staying ahead of the need to replace or upgrade technology, you cut back on downtime and minimize the lost productivity of employees who can’t work because their technology is kaput.
You should also have a recovery plan. How long will it take your business to be back online with all the files recovered? Will your systems roll back to an hour before the server crash, or will it take you back 3 weeks? You want to minimize the amount of time that your systems are down, of course. But you also need to take care that the amount of data lost is minimal and that it takes little time to recover.
Having IT costs unexpectedly pop up is frustrating. With stronger IT planning, you can start to avoid the unexpected and have more predictability in your costs.
Do you have a technology expert helping you plan your business strategies? Contact Connecting Point at 970-356-7224.
