As a small business, you need to make the most out of a limited budget. If there’s one thing that can easily put a major dent in it, it’s surprise information technology expenses.
While you can’t prevent employees from accidentally breaking their laptops, hard drives from becoming corrupted, and printers from suddenly displaying critical error messages, you can always align your IT budget with your current and future business needs.
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It's Cheaper to Prepare Than React
Your business journey is like a series of road trips. You always start someplace familiar and, if successful, end up in your destination, closer to your customers, goals, and profits.
Preparing a Budget to Avoid Surprise IT Costs
Anyone who has been on a road trip knows that it’s always cheaper to pack food and other necessities from home than it is to buy them along the way. Unfortunately, many decision makers act as if this wasn’t the case when preparing their IT budgets.
Instead of carefully analyzing how much it will cost to reach a certain destination (such as make it possible for employees to work remotely or move data to cloud storage) and adjusting their budgets accordingly, they only see the current costs.
That’s a problem because it costs much less money to simply keep the lights on than it does to, for example, replace incandescent light bulbs with modern LEDs—or outdated desktop computers with hybrid work-friendly laptops. You get the idea.
The Importance of Business–IT Alignment
The reason why IT budgets often don’t reflect future business needs fundamentally stems from business-IT misalignment.
Surprise IT Costs Have Become the Inevitable
Way too many businesses still rely on the break-fix model of providing information technology services, paying for the services of IT solution providers on an as-needed basis. It’s not uncommon for such businesses to see IT as a supporting character that enters the stage only when something goes wrong.
When IT plays the role of a supporting character, it doesn’t know much about the business side of things, so IT employees can’t really take into consideration the bigger picture and align the solutions they implement with it. Likewise, decision-makers can make only rough guesses about IT costs, so surprise IT costs become practically inevitable.
To create business-IT alignment, it’s necessary for the executive team to promote the IT team to the role of a main character and establish a dialogue with it. Since the break-fix model makes this extremely difficult, organizations should embrace the managed services model.
Create Alignment with Strategic IT Planning
Managed service providers (MSPs) like us at Teal deliver IT services proactively for a predictable investment, typically based on either the number of managed endpoints or the number of end users. The best MSPs gather information to clearly understand their customers’ business strategies to come up with tailored solutions that drive growth and eliminate surprise information technology costs.
Here’s how we create business-IT alignment with our strategic planning process:
1. Discovery
We perform a comprehensive assessment to discover as much information about your current and future business needs as we can.
2. Technical Analysis
We examine your existing IT environment to determine when and where improvements are needed.
3. Business Goals & Challenges
We analyze the needs, risks, and pain points of your business.
4. Technology Business Review
We evaluate your current IT infrastructure to determine how efficient and secure your network is and how it connects to your business operations.
5. Implement Initiatives
We implement a tailored solution quickly and diligently to avoid causing any disruption to the productivity of your employees.
6. Measure & Repeat
We continue to manage and monitor the overall health of your IT infrastructure and optimize it as needed.
Once you’ve created business-IT alignment by taking advantage of Teal’s strategic IT planning, you can navigate the ever-changing world of business without surprise IT expenses slowing you down.
To learn more about how our strategic IT planning can help guide you on your next business journey, schedule a free consultation to talk with one of our IT experts.
