If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s the need to build resilient businesses that survive such turbulent periods. In the past 1 year, words like ‘digital transformation’ and ‘digital strategies’ have been thrown around a lot, with good reason. If you are among the 80% businesses worldwide who have fast-tracked at least some digital transformation programs in 2020, you are on the right track. If you haven’t, you need to understand that only 11% companies worldwide believe that their present business models will be viable by 2023, without any digital strategies. Are you one of them? Here’s 7 Tips for Offering Better IT Support at the Office.
However, this article is not about just digital transformation. The thing is that true digital transformation is complicated, and 70% of these strategies are expected to fail. To truly increase the success chances, companies’ IT departments need to consider the following factors.
Tip #1 Do Something About a Lacklustre IT Department
A weak IT department limits your company’s ability to meet changing market demands. It also increases the timeline to develop, deploy or release new services and products, that impacts customer satisfaction. Also, if you are among the 34% of US small businesses facing difficulties in hiring people, you will need the support of an IT support company. Such a company can do timely installations, repairs, upgrading, back-up and other services to ensure the smooth running of your IT tools.
Tip#2 Adopt a Modern, Agile and Scalable Digital Technology Architecture
Just adopting a wide variety of IT systems and mobile apps won’t do the trick. You have to efficiently integrate new applications with cloud services or with existing third-party system. Omni-channel integration across all platforms will be the key to ensure that you are not stuck with data siloes. Centralised data access is crucial to improving productivity, enhance operational efficiency and create an agile enterprise.
Tip#3 Invest in Effective Data Storage and Back-up Plans System
As your employees continue to work remotely, your data is more vulnerable than you think. Up to 1,500 businesses worldwide faced ransomware attacks in 2020, depicting the gravity of the situation. You have to ensure that your IT support provider implements the best practises to ensure effective data back-up to protect against breaches. There has to be a disaster recovery plan to retrieve your corrupted or crashed data to minimise downtimes and losses.
Tip #4 Take Cybersecurity as a Primary Business Concern
Cybercrime is expected to cost the world $10.5 trillion annually by 2025. You cannot afford to ignore the threat of a cyber-attack anymore, irrespective of your operational model or size of the business. Not only can they expose your customer data and become a reputational risk, the amount of time it will take to mediate will significantly hamper your bottom line.
Tip#5 Don’t Just Introduce New Tools for the Heck of It
Google finds 12 billion results for business tools in a matter of seconds. New technologies bombard the corporate world every year. It is not necessary that your business needs all that grabs headlines. You need to have a credible case for adopting new tools. Saving IT related costs while sacrificing employee productivity does more harm to a business. This is why there is a need for effective monitoring tools and metrics to measure success of digital transformation efforts. This could be defining financial outcomes, tracking roadblocks, or measuring productivity.
Tip#6 Effective Communication Tools is Part of the Picture
Proper IT support practises include managing the communication system of your business through effective strategies. In this era of remote working, your IT support team must have tools to resolve technical issues that can arise during video calls, web conferences, online interviews and more so that you don’t lose precious clients, and the business runs smoothly.
Tip #7 Encourage an Enterprise Wide Digital Mindset
Tip #7! And the last of our 7 Tips for Offering Better IT Support at the Office. Going forward into the future, the relationship between your business value and IT is expected to deepen. The IT department will be key to drive profitable business growth. It is important to drive a digital mindset in the company to help them drive maximum outcomes. This means bringing in cross-functional agile principles, and providing continuous learning opportunities to employees to handle new systems.
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of having resilient businesses that can survive turbulent times. Digital transformation has become a crucial aspect of this, with 80% of businesses fast-tracking their digital transformation programs worldwide. However, true digital transformation is a complex process and 70% of these strategies are expected to fail. To increase the chances of success, IT departments need to focus on improving their IT support, adopting modern and agile technology architecture, investing in effective data storage and back-up plans, taking cybersecurity seriously, introducing new tools only when necessary, having effective communication tools, and encouraging a digital mindset across the enterprise. By doing so, businesses can use these 7 Tips for Offering Better IT Support at the Office to increase their chances of success and ensure their long-term viability.
