The four pillars of IT success are fundamental for sustaining high performance and excellent client service delivery. In our last piece we covered the two fundamental pillars of stability and security, which are foundational for sustaining success. In this piece, we examine the more dynamic and forward-looking pillars of Support and Strategy. Top notch Support will ensure your people get the help they need so that they can return to serving your clients and working towards your business goals.
Support: Getting You Back on the Road
Information Technology becomes increasingly complex as a business evolves and grows. It becomes harder to manage and harmonize. Devices and applications begin to not work as expected, while oversight across the whole environment can get gradually lost. When technology isn’t working it means your people are not as productive, it can also impact client experience, and company morale. In keeping up with this, there is often much wasted time and energy that could be spent elsewhere.
Most businesses don’t have the resources internally to provide technical IT support to their employees, and building one from scratch can be quite complex and expensive. By partnering with a proactive Managed IT Services Provider (MSP), you get access to a team of professionals who are able to help with solving these problems as they arise.
Support is crucial for getting your business back on the road. When a vehicle breaks down, it stops being operational, limiting the driver. If a part of your business ceases to work, it disrupts the operational chain and the delivery of end services, so having fast, reliable and effective Support that resolves challenges at the root-cause level is essential for empowering performance. It also has a critical forward-looking function that complements the growth of your business. The Support pillar encompasses:
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- Helpdesk support that diagnoses and resolves problems
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- Network optimization that improves speed and reliability
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- Monitoring and maintenance across the IT environment
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- Foreseeing potential problems and proactively addressing them
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- Empowering business continuity though data backup and recovery solutions
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- Adding and managing users, and configuring permissions
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- Documenting the IT environment, as well as its policies and processes
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- Rolling out hardware and software updates, as well as IT projects more broadly
And much more! Support is about maintaining, optimizing and expanding your IT and technology to support the growth of your business and client delivery, making it a crucial pillar.
Implementing the Support pillar can be time-consuming and expensive, especially if a business undergoes the process alone. We would recommend working with an MSP to get the best out of this key area, which will save time and money, and offer return on investment more quickly.
Strategy: Investing in technology to help your business achieve goals and solve problems
Your Strategy first and foremost is based on a destination; to get there, you need to map a viable path. On the way, there will be both expected and unexpected obstacles, and you should also consider the means that you’re using to get there too!
This is why Strategy is the fourth and final crucial pillar of IT Success. This pillar empowers a business to leverage technology to achieve its goals more seamlessly; it makes the path to success smoother and helps anticipate the challenges and opportunities along the way. Remember, this pillar will also need to account for the other three pillars; a good strategy is always a holistic one.
Strategy is partly about creating a technology roadmap that plots a course for innovation, integration, and growth. There are always technology solutions in the market that can add profitable value to your business and its clients, and with the right information and methods, you can harness them to drive your business forward.
It’s not just this, it means accounting for your IT environment and keeping it aligned and functionally fit for your goals. An expanding business may need to seamlessly transition to a new office, upgrade its connectivity, or replace a legacy system, which can all be challenging and technically complex goals. With in-house or outsourced MSP expertise, harnessing this pillar becomes much easier.
The Strategy pillar has a number of key ingredients:
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- Planning and Alignment: start with the outcomes that you want based on your context and constraints, and start asking how your IT can help you towards them and assess how it is currently hindering them.
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- Assess Your Technology: What are the pros and cons of the software, hardware and infrastructure of your IT environment? This can be as simple as using a SWOT analysis, or via more sophisticated frameworks such as a technology maturity model.
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- Create a Technology Roadmap: In plain English, this involves documenting viable technology solutions that complement your goals and creating an action plan for implementing them over time. This will also need to factor in your resources and constraints.
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- Documentation and oversight: documenting and having ways to measure your IT environment, including its cybersecurity, performance and reliability, are crucial for getting a quantifiable handle over the achievement of your goals, alongside qualitative factors.
Combining The Four Pillars: Driving Daily Success and Strategic Improvement
A robust IT support system helps keep your business running like clockwork and can facilitate small enhancements over time that lead to leaps in performance across your business. While the IT strategy pillar helps your business to make the smart and sustainable big leaps that it needs to sharpen its competitive edge.
There are a range of benefits that really add up when these two are combined, this includes improved employee experiences and end-product deliveries, more efficiency and profitability, as well as expansion for your business. Put together, the two enable a smooth journey down the best roads towards performance and client success.
When you factor in stability and security and use your IT strategy to continually align them with the evolution of your business, the total is a whole that is far more than the sum of its parts. With the four Pllars of IT Success, your operations will be reliable and resilient in the face of harm and disruption, as well as able to continually improve and enhance performance, while also catalysing strategic growth and delivery.
We hope that this series on our four pillars of IT Success has been useful to your business. If you would like a hand with harnessing these four pillars to drive success, get in touch with Tier3. Whether you need tailored guidance or services, we will be there to listen to your needs and help you overcome the challenges that you face on your road to success.
Tier3 IT Solutions – Your Premier IT Support Provider in Edmonton
Looking for top-tier IT support in Edmonton, Alberta? Look no further than Tier3 IT Solutions. As the foremost IT support company in the region, we specialize in delivering tailored solutions designed to address the specific requirements of businesses in Edmonton and beyond. Our seasoned team of technicians is dedicated to providing prompt help desk support and maintaining a proactive stance towards IT management.
At Tier3 IT, we understand the importance of a robust technology infrastructure for your business. That’s why we offer a comprehensive suite of services ranging from network monitoring and cybersecurity to cloud solutions and data backup. With Tier3 IT at your side, rest assured that your technology needs are in capable hands.
Experience unmatched reliability and efficiency with Tier3 IT Solutions. Contact us today to learn more about how we can elevate your IT experience in Edmonton and propel your business forward.
