Why an IT Strategy is as important as a Business Strategy?
With many businesses, big or small, technology plays a vital role in everyday operations. However, most businesses do not have an IT strategy or what we like to call an IT roadmap, in place. They either didn’t know it existed or they are unaware of the importance of having one for their own business.
Do you have a business strategy, but not an IT Strategy?
What is an IT Strategy?
The purpose of having an IT Strategy is to offer business owners direction on how to utilise technology to support their business. An IT strategy highlights any risks and shares recommendations on how to reduce them. It also outlines your business’s technology and how it aligns with your business goals.
As businesses grow IT infrastructure, software and applications are often added on an ad-hoc basis. The company can end up with a mismatch of operating systems, old infrastructure that runs slowly and software from multiple vendors that doesn’t work well together. Putting in place an IT Strategy can alleviate these issues and increase efficiency in your business.
The benefits why you need an IT strategy in place
- Gives you a roadmap
Your IT strategy needs to align with your overall business strategy, so it is important that the IT strategy works in alignment with your business strategy. This roadmap must therefore include the steps your business has to take to drive more value from IT to achieve the overall business goals.
2. Competitive advantage
As mentioned above, the IT strategy must work alongside your business strategy, so it is important to ensure you always have the edge against your competitors by conducting a competitive analysis and specify what advantages you have in respect to your competitors.
- Allows delegation of decision-making
When employees know the strategic IT plan, they will take your instructions and follow the structure of the established plan. A strategic plan helps your managers to delegate tasks to staff, providing a framework that encourages confident decision-making. It creates a shorthand to let your team understand what management is thinking and trying to communicate, so they can comply quickly and correctly.
- Helps to identify where corrective action is needed
Continuous assessment should be part of your IT strategy to help you evaluate your current position and what adjustments are needed to ensure you are going in the right direction and bring to your attention any obstacles that may need to be corrected to improve your overall outputs.
- Provides tools to respond to change
Given the way technology changes and given current condition of our current infrastructure and continued power-outages, it is important to leverage change to your businesses advantage. Anticipating change on the horizon in advance and develop a plan to manage those changes with as little disruption as possible. Even more important is the fact that IT strategic planning allows your team to be better prepared for unexpected changes, such as a system outage.
6. Budget
Your IT strategy won’t be complete without knowing the budget your company has and the cost you would allocate to reach your business goals. Developing a financial assessment of IT systems and processes can give you control over the company’s performance.
In a Nutshell: An IT strategy is good for your overall business health
At the end of the day, every business decision you make is intended to improve the health of your business. An IT strategy allows you to use technology as a tool for a healthier business, rather than just another necessary cost of keeping the doors open. When IT systems align with your business strategy, technology becomes a vehicle for business growth and opportunity.
Of course, having a strategy is one thing; making sure it is efficiently implemented and able to evolve are equally important. Have you got the right IT partner for your IT strategy?
Invest in an IT partner that you can trust
Rito-Technologies is an IT business partner that maximises business output through technology. They enable their clients to optimise efficiencies with their IT Strategic Planning, which is guaranteed to increase your accessibility, productivity, and levels of communication with the right level of technology for business and potential customers.
With our free IT assessment, we can help you establish how you currently use IT in your business, and we can also identify areas for improvement as well as fill the gaps to present further opportunities for growth with an IT roadmap.
For more information about our IT assessment to help you improve your business, get in touch with us at info@rito-tech.co.za or call us on 010 213 7016 and we will gladly assist you.
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