Is Your IT Team Focusing on What's Important to Them Rather Than What's Important to the Business?

If your IT infrastructure is not meeting your business needs and enabling the business objectives you're after, it can often seem like this is for a wide range of different reasons. Sometimes you feel like you've invested in the wrong solution at the wrong time. In other instances, you may feel like the assets you're working with are so new that you're just not set up to utilise them properly.

However, while these may seem like separate ideas, they're really not. In truth, they all lead back to the same basic core: a disconnect between the perceived role of IT as an 'internal utility' versus what it really is, a key player in your overall business strategy.

Oftentimes, this can take the form of an additional symptom. Your IT team, the people in charge of steering the ship so to speak, are focusing too much on what is important to THEM as opposed to what is important to the business they're trying to serve.

This is nobody's fault. If anything, it's emblematic of the old-school approach to information technology that is still firmly entrenched in many businesses around the world. But if you're really going to drive the outcomes you need and empower collaboration and higher productivity while achieving other benefits along the way, you have to bridge this gap as soon as you can for the benefit of all involved. Doing so requires you to keep a few key things in mind.

There's a reason why three of the most important ingredients for a digital transformation include time, vision, and a willingness to drive necessary change in the first place. They're all required to actually integrate IT into your business, rather than simply viewing it as a new set of toys to play with.

To truly get your IT team to stop focusing on what's important to them and start thinking about what’s important to your business, you need to make sure that these two concepts are one and the same through communication and collaboration. 

This type of collaborative comms generally starts at the very top of a business, with senior executives and other key stakeholders setting goals and creating strategies to make sure that an overall vision is properly communicated across an enterprise. People don't just need to know what you want them to do, they also need to know why. They need to know what benefit they'll receive and, in turn, how that funnels back into the business. This is truly how you create a viable all-hands-on-deck approach that is absolutely necessary for digital transformation.

Much of this will come down to the definition between core and non-core activities. A core IT need will vary depending on the business you're trying to run, but it ultimately leads directly into what it is that your business actually needs from IT. This is one of the major reasons that companies often choose to work with third-party providers like an MSP in the first place. By moving non-core or non-essential tasks into the cloud, the IT team is free to focus on the things that the business really needs — those that will actually move it forward instead of preserving the status quo.

Another key factor to focus on during this time comes down to a matter of perspective. Technology should be treated as a potential business growth engine, as opposed to being just an afterthought.

Both your IT and upper organisational leaders need to see a real need behind every action. All steps taken should legitimately improve a business, including the way it functions and the ease at which it connects to the world around you in a real, tangible way. Anything that doesn't meet that requirement probably shouldn't be a focus in the first place. 

This is also likely going to require a major shift in your overall governance model, but rest assured that this is for the better. Make the decision points around not just emergent technology, but the strategy, the planning, and the implementation of the said technology. Again, this all feeds back into knowing what is a core or essential activity and what isn’t. This type of approach to governance will help you focus on action instead of reaction, and it will allow you to put plans in place to not just implement technology but integrate it, tackling the organisation and communication requirements necessary to integrate IT into your business instead of piling it on top.

Ultimately, this is how business outcomes aren't just generated, but guaranteed.

At Lanrex, we often find that the biggest hurdle when it comes to executing a successful digital transformation is ultimately one of perspective. Your IT team wants to be able to work smarter, not harder, yes — and you should want this for them. But only by making an effort to guarantee that your technological strategy is properly aligned with your long-term objectives as a business will you be able to generate the outcomes you need when you need them the most.

To find out more information about why your IT is not meeting your business needs, or to discuss some of the other challenges that you're facing in greater detail, please don't delay, contact Lanrex today.