Top Five IT Lessons – Number 2 : Business Transformation

The COVID Lockdown enforced unprecedented and unplanned business transformation to enable organisations to deal with a changed world. Numerous experts from the big tech companies have be quoted as saying that 2020 has resulted in more than a decade of IT transformation in a single year. This experience has given business leaders a new understanding and appetite for what is possible, making further business transformation a priority on many organisations.

Which is why business transformation is in our top five list, coming in at number two. The key lesson being that a changing world, needs an agile business capable of adapting to new circumstance, and IT has a central role to play in making this possible.

Time for change

Organisations are always looking to technology for new ways to improve their business, whether it’s a move to a cloud-based system or process automation. Usually, this involves making changes to the way you do things to make operations better, faster or cheaper. It can involve changes to, as well as the modernisation; of network architecture, hardware, software, IT service management or how data is stored and accessed.

• Does your infrastructure need to adjust to the way you are delivering services today?
• How do you manage and access legacy on-premises applications?
• Are you looking for modern alternatives to traditional storage methods to support exponential data growth?

Keeping up

To keep pace in an increasingly competitive market requires not only optimising existing systems but also creating and acquiring new applications and services. Increasingly, significant value is perceived and derived from greater insights into business, industry and customers. IT departments are being called to adapt from being reactive and inflexible to being proactive and flexible so they can respond quickly to changing requirements and support making more informed decisions.

• How is your network coping with the changing demands being placed on it?
• What new services and applications will the business need to draw upon?
  
• How do you support the new remote workforce that has evolved?

Transformation

The transformation required of IT is to build a solid foundation on which to deliver automated services, cloud computing and new operating models. It also needs to automate and accelerate the deployment of IT services and reduce risk during deployments. Through the optimisation of the traditional cost model, the budget can be shifted from ongoing operational expenses into innovation and better alignment with the business.

Modernising your traditional on premise based SOE for a remote workforce can be challenging, Winthrop have many solutions for cloud-based device management which integrate well into existing environment whether on premise or cloud-based. You may already have licensing for some of these solutions and are yet to take advantage of it. Winthrop can help you on the journey to a cloud native business which includes device management no matter what Operating System you are running.

Your strategy

The transformation journey starts with senior management and stakeholders developing a clear vision of the future state and a business case to support its deployment. As well as the requirements, scope and scale, there needs to be a clear timeline as well. The following important steps need to be included:

• Modernise existing, critical infrastructure for efficiency improvements in operational expenses and management overheads.
• Automate the provisioning and deployment of applications to increase speed and reduce risks. This includes automating the delivery and consumption of IT services.
• Transform processes and operations to increase agility and align goals, staff and roles as much as possible.