Ensure your IT environment meets business requirements 

Today, more and more decisions on IT projects are made in the business without the involvement of IT managers. To keep up and help the business make smart choices, the IT department needs to be at the forefront of technology and understand the requirements and needs of the business. A good IT environment includes technology, tactics and strategy.

If you ask the question "What are your requirements for IT?" to your employees, you may get answers that may surprise you at first. For employees, the most important thing is not technology, but how to work smart in the best way.

The challenge for the traditional IT department may be to keep up with the evolution of the business, thus the increased need of employees to be more efficient. The risk of not capturing this need in time can lead to employees creating their own solutions to it. The result is a disjointed IT environment that is difficult to control and manage.

Here are three simple tips on how to make your IT department a natural part of your business

• Focus on creating the conditions for employees to be mobile and not locked into the physical workplace. It is important for employees to have access to emails and documents at all hours of the day.

• Actively participate in business projects to understand business processes and their needs.

• Conduct a baseline analysis to identify the IT requirements of your business.

Creating competitiveness with IT

When working with IT, it is important to be at the forefront to see the benefits and opportunities of new solutions. At the same time, you need to be tactical and make the right arguments to create an understanding among management of the importance of planning and investing in technology.

Technology and IT are no longer just servers in a server room, but IT is much more than that. For example, IT can be business systems or apps on a mobile phone. With IT, your business creates competitiveness by, for example, enabling the sales organisation to have access to the latest version of the company presentation at a meeting with a new customer.

Today, companies compete not only for customers but also for the right employees. Businesses therefore need to have efficient IT while offering the right conditions to their staff.

Why invest in a review of your IT environment?

Today, business IT consists of different components such as infrastructure, cloud services and applications. There may also be components that the business is not aware of in the form of proprietary solutions designed by employees. Knowing what the overall IT environment looks like and how it meets needs can be difficult for the IT department to find out.

When the business is helped to review its IT environment and how it meets its needs, it receives a concrete action plan with recommendations on how to invest in its IT environment in the future.

For example, business systems do not meet the requirements of employees. To fix this, it is often not enough to upgrade to the latest version as there may be integrations etc. that also need to be addressed. Systems vendors usually assume that their customers are already up in the cloud. This means that they do not take into account costs related to the system and any integrations that may also be affected by an upgrade.

In a review of your IT environment, the external partner captures the whole picture and makes the analysis necessary for the company to create its strategy to keep up with digital developments.

Key steps in reviewing your IT environment

In order to establish control over the existing infrastructure and to lay a foundation for future strategic IT decisions, it is a good idea to identify the requirements of the business IT in relation to the existing systems. The overall steps are as follows:

• In order to identify the IT needs of the business, the business managers and selected employees should be interviewed by an external party to make the needs as realistic as possible.
• The next step is to find out how the existing IT environment meets these needs.
• The external partner then evaluates the needs of the business and creates the order of priorities that should be the basis for the transformation.

Click on the link below to learn more about how to map the business requirements of your IT environment. When you press the button, a contact form will appear which you will need to fill in to download the document.