One of the greatest questions that all IT professionals must answer is: How can I gain a competitive advantage for my business?
Sounds easy. But it’s not.
Gaining competitive advantage also requires juggling with tight budgets, dealing with external factors such as a pandemic and the revolution of remote jobs, or just spending hundreds of hours searching for top IT infrastructure solutions.
The rapid pace of innovation and ease of scalability present today’s businesses with historic levels of challenge and opportunity. To remain relevant to your customers and partners in the modern marketplace, companies must be agile and embrace change.
The focus for many IT departments has moved to delivering overall strategy, innovation, and value to the business.
It’s time for IT buyers to quickly grasp the different components of their business and guide them through the process of procuring IT infrastructure solutions that best fit current and future business needs.
The following steps will help to expedite the sourcing process and ensure you end up with the right IT infrastructure services to meet your business and technical requirements – and gain a solid competitive advantage.
1. Conducting in-depth assessments
The first step of understanding the type of IT infrastructure solutions that you need is to understand your current IT infrastructure needs.
Sounds redundant. However, it’s a simple step that most IT professionals mistakenly ignore.
Now, to discover your needs, you must accurately assess all areas in your business both in terms of where you are now, and where you plan to be in the next 1-5 years.
2. Analyze your assessments: From the paper to actual IT solutions
After completing the business assessments and application assessment, you will have a bunch of data and ideas that need to be processed, so you can move towards a wiser selection of your IT infrastructure outsourcing solutions.
Use the data gathered to begin eliminating options and produce potential technology solution(s) that will meet your business and technology needs.
Some IT infrastructure solutions that you might have identified:
- Communication Services
- Networking
- Data Processing
- Data Storage
- Content & Media
- Knowledge Management
- Systems
- Applications
- IoT
- User Devices
- Information Security
3. Evaluate and Source your IT infrastructure solution(s)
After determining your potential IT solution(s), you are ready to evaluate and source service provider options.
This includes understanding all costs associated with each solution, vetting potential vendors, and negotiating the best price and contract terms.
4. It’s time to Deploy/Execute
Implementations are never perfect and sometimes they’re harder than expected.
It’s critical to have a well-thought-out strategy and detailed plan to ensure the smoothest possible transition with the least number of pain points and business impacts.
Here are a few considerations for your plan:
- Get buy-in from your team and other stakeholders and set realistic timelines
- Redline and execute selected vendor contracts
- Order needed hardware and/or software
- Coordinate a migration schedule with your vendors and internal team
- Test and test again
This wise decision can make you gain a solid competitive advantage
The process is easy to follow.
However, it might be hard when you need to invest many hours searching, contacting, and negotiating the best deals.
The good news is that we can help you save money and time when sourcing your IT infrastructure solutions.
Contact us to leverage your business competitive advantage with the experience of our professional team.
