Nickie Peters, Sr. Product Marketing Manager
For many businesses, the IT department is an inescapable cost center—it helps churn out monthly reports, stores and protects data, and keeps business systems running. Resources are scarce (and getting scarcer) and the IT team is often left to react to change rather than proactively manage it. In essence, “turning dials” has become more important than innovation that can drive business growth.
But these businesses can’t continue this way. According to Deloitte’s Tech Trends 2018 report: “IT’s traditional reactive, siloed ways of working cannot support the rapid-fire change that drives business today.”
The maddening pace of change
The pace of change is rapid-fire. Customer demand is increasing, competitive differentiation is narrowing, and lines are blurring.
Clearly, change isn’t going away. In a recent article, Gartner Vice President and Distinguished Analyst Matt Cain said that:
“Digital business models and platforms are fundamentally restructuring how business is conducted. Cloud services are increasing the speed of technology change at a rate unthinkable in the days of on-premises deployment. At the same time, the nature of work is being transformed with new work patterns such as the gig economy and flatter organization models, while artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to transform how work is done.”
So in an era of pervasive and persistent change, how can IT become more relevant to your business?
Deriving business value from IT
Technology is driving opportunity, and businesses that fully embrace technology will be better able to grow and thrive amidst change. “From the top down, CIOs and their teams have an opportunity to transform how the shop budgets, organizes, staffs, and delivers services,” said Deloitte.
Instead of a piecemeal series of add-ons and patches meant to solve an immediate need, it may be better to create a holistic IT plan that delivers long-lasting impact to your organization. In other words, a commonsense pathway to IT that allows you to be more agile and responsive to business opportunities.
At Logicalis, we call that pathway Extensible IT.
Taking the next step with the Logicalis Extensible IT framework
Extensible IT is a framework that makes it easier to deploy and manage new business services, whether onsite or in the cloud, and automate service management so your IT team doesn’t spend its time turning dials. You can:
- Manage through a single pane of glass, not multiple platforms and management tools.
- Smoothly exchange and trust your data so you can make the best business decisions.
- Harden security throughout your environment to avoid business disruption.
- Have a solid plan for business continuity in case of disruption or disaster.
- Empower your IT team to spend time on value-added business innovation, not non-value tasks.
The fact is, your organization will continue to invest in IT. So why not adopt a commonsense plan that drives new opportunities instead of a patchwork approach that hinders the business?
“The sooner you start thinking about them [changes] and planning for them,” said Howard Tullman, CEO of 1871, in a recent article, “the more prepared you’re going to be and the more likely you are to be surfing the waves rather than drowning in the floods.”
Learn more about how Extensible IT helps drive business opportunities and how our consultative approach can help you create a business-enabling Extensible IT pathway. And stay tuned to Logicalis Insights for upcoming posts on Extensible IT!