Is Your IT Department an Innovator or a Roadblock?

What role does the IT department play in your business? Does it contribute to strategic initiatives, or does it mostly provide day-to-day support for your users and systems?

Many users desire IT to serve as an innovation enabler that contributes to strategic initiatives and business success. What’s preventing IT from stepping up to lead innovation efforts? Studies have shown that 80% of the IT headcount is focused on the lower 20% of problems (break/fix, upgrades, maintenance, etc.). This means most employees miss out on the strategic, impactful work that needs to be done to drive the organization forward.

According to the “Can Your IT Team Culture Drive Your Digital Ambitions” article from Smarter with Gartner: “Many CIOs recognize that the way IT employees get work done today isn’t what the enterprise needs to meet its digital ambitions, but few know how to get rid of stubborn, unproductive behaviors,” says Daniel Sanchez-Reina, VP Analyst, Gartner. “They need a rigorous way to gauge what needs to change.”

The problem is clear: How can IT serve a strategic function when it is constantly bombarded with one-off issues? There simply isn’t enough time to be innovative, because innovation is not a simple, one-off task. It takes a great deal of time and effort achieve IT innovation and, ultimately, become a trusted partner to executives and individual business units.

There’s a solution for IT departments that wish to evolve their role in the business: teaming up with a managed services provider. Managed services providers can ease the transition by helping IT:

• Build and execute a successful strategy. A managed services provider ensures that the solutions IT deploys for the business are functioning properly and driving productivity, efficiency, and agility. IT saves time, saves money, and resolves minor issues before they grow into service-affecting problems.
  
  
• Devote resources to strategic, business-enhancing priorities. As managed service providers handle the day-to-day issues and prevent more severe issues from arising, the IT department is freed up to lead innovation efforts.
  
  
• Take technology decision-making back into IT. A managed services provider ensures optimal performance and productivity gains from your technology. The increased usability of these technologies drives user adoption, as users stop feeling the need to rely on their own approaches to get their work done effectively.
  
  
• Build business credibility and contribute to business success. When users see the value in IT policies, processes, and systems, they stop viewing IT as a roadblock. When executives see clear productivity gains and more satisfied users, they grow more confident in IT’s role in the business. When IT is available to drive innovation efforts, it rebrands itself as the center of innovation within the business. As a whole, these changes make IT a clear and significant contributor to business success.

Are you ready to transform your IT operations? Adopting a managed services strategy enables you to be more competitive by capitalizing on your internal strengths and entrusting routine IT tasks to an experienced partner.

[ GARTNER MARKET GUIDE ]

Gartner has named ConvergeOne a Representative Vendor in the latest Gartner Market Guide for Professional and Managed Services for Meeting Solutions (May 10, 2021). The Market Guide explains that “Virtual meeting solution requirements are increasingly complex and have outpaced the ability of many IT departments to successfully architect, implement and manage those solutions. Sourcing, procurement and vendor management leaders can use this Market Guide to review professional and managed service vendors available for remedy.”

Gartner, Market Guide for Professional and Managed Services for Meeting Solutions, Tom Eagle, Katja Ruud, 10 May 2021

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.