Tech not doing what you need it to do? Is your tech stack a mess? Strategic IT planning can help. Time to call the experts.
Key Takeaways:
- Does your business-critical technology align with your business goals?
- Did you know that a disorganized, messy, complicated tech stack craters productivity, increases poor customer experience, and costs you money daily?
- Do you have the data to make business decisions?
- Does your tech stack have a strategy that brings efficiency, saves money, retains employees, and crushes the competition?
- The answer to all these questions? An MSP
Your organization’s tech stack – your business-critical technology – should be optimized to align with your growth strategy. As technology evolves, it is tempting to add “the next big thing,” but when it comes to tech, more is not always better, and leaders must select tools that have the most positive impact.
Your tech stack should facilitate work rather than add to it. Neglecting your tech stack harms innovation and growth, wasting resources and creating operational problems. So, is your tech stack a mess? Strategic IT planning can help.
By only engaging in the day-to-day business, your tech stack is likely not a top priority. That is until something goes wrong, or you need functionality that isn’t part of your current stack. This spurs a hunt to find something that works and find it quickly. In the heat of the moment, are you making the best choice? Probably not.
Without a growth strategy, you wouldn’t run a business, and your IT needs the same planning considerations. With strategic IT for tech stacks, the right choices lead to time and money savings and performance improvements. The right IT managed services provider (MSP) can help you plan, streamline your tech stack, and find opportunities for your company to boost efficiencies and increase revenue.
The state of your current tech stack
Most tech stacks are unorganized, leading to excessive and unnecessary spending. But a well-organized one eliminates “dark purchasing” – when impulsive buying decisions are made outside the standard process. Dark purchases don’t consider essential aspects, including ROI, feature overlaps, etc. Among other benefits, when your tech stack is organized, you have transparency that provides visibility into existing tools to prevent redundant purchases.
Common tech stack issues
The leading issue organizations face with their tech stack is complexity and solving this affects profits, productivity, and security. As new technologies are adopted, there’s always the issue of backward compatibility, leading to a convoluted system that is almost impossible to manage and maintain, much less to keep secure.
The consequences of this complex tech stack include inefficiency, and higher operational costs, making you a sitting duck for a data hack. Technology upgrades made without a strategic plan that doesn’t include integrating current tools with new ones are a recipe for disaster.
Assessing your current tech stack
Your tech stack must support your business (including your employees and customers) today and in the future. Assess your current tech stack by answering these questions:
- Is this still being used? Look at every system you have in place and ask yourself if you are entirely using them. There may be functionalities that aren’t being exploited, or a better solution could lie within a new system.
- What are the pros of your existing stack? Maybe your existing stack has an excellent customer service component or a friendly, intuitive interface. Whatever you like about your existing stack should top any new additions or modifications requirements.
- What are the cons of your existing stack? Does it lack the features needed to keep productivity high? Can you get the data you need to make informed business decisions? Take a good hard look to make an informed decision.
- Does it all integrate seamlessly? This is a significant problem with many enterprise tech stacks. Siloed systems mean productivity loss, duplication, redundancy, and errors making it almost impossible to get the information you need to make data-driven decisions, and data drives today’s world.
What happens if you don’t address tech stack issues?
The cost of a poorly strategized tech stack is enormous. It hurts employee retention and tanks productivity - aside from costing money, it can cost you customers. It can also leave you sitting at the wrong end of digital transformation. As your competitors get their tech stacks in order, you’ll be left in the dust using obsolete technology or a system so befuddling it doesn’t really work for anyone.
Choosing, building, and organizing the right tech stack takes a holistic approach, and when you’re deep into the day-to-day, it can be hard to see the big picture, to develop strategic IT for tech stacks. This is where an MSP can prove invaluable.
What is an MSP, and why do you need one?
When you use an MSP to plan strategic IT for tech stacks, you’re working with a partner that will help you devise and implement a realistic, actionable IT strategy that will help your business grow and keep up with its evolution. An MSP takes the long view, applies IT best practices, and helps you create a tech stack that meets overall business objectives, helps with market differentiation, and provides more customer value.
An MSP can:
- Efficiently assess your current tech stack
- Identify bottlenecks and fix them
- Lower operational costs by preventing “dark purchasing” and has transparent costs
- Understands technology and its impact on the future of your business
- Help move your business in the right direction to meet its goals
- Quick response times and 24/7 monitoring
Working with an MSP means you can outsource your IT support needs so your internal team can focus on business objectives rather than those tasks that take up so much time. And by collaborating and brainstorming with your team, you can identify opportunities for growth and improvement, and swiftly act on them.
Creating and implementing a strategic IT plan with an MSP
Your MSP will provide advice and input on your IT strategy to help the business grow now and into the future. You’ll gain the ability to leverage data and apply modern analytics to obtain fact-based, integrated metrics so you can make better business decisions. Data security is a big issue today, and an MSP has all the latest tools to foil cybercriminals by monitoring and updating as needed.
An exceptional MSP helps businesses create an IT strategy that meets budget and financial needs, while MSP architects and account managers ensure that the IT strategy moves the business forward effectively.
Perhaps peace of mind is the greatest of all benefits of using an MSP to develop strategic IT for tech stacks. Is someone on your IT team on vacation or out sick? You have a ready, willing, and more than able IT staff to ensure a dedicated team of experts supports your newly organized tech stack.
The simplest, most cost-effective tech stacks come from professionals. Endsight is an outsourced technology support solution that thinks strategically about business technology and how it helps our clients meet their goals.
Strategy is the first step in any project, and our process creates optimal IT solutions and technical support for businesses, large and small. Endsight’s core values bring not only peace of mind, but an honest partnership, commitment to your long-term success, and unparalleled, dependable service. Not sure about your tech stack? Reach out today for a free assessment.
Assess your network environments, improve your tech stack, and much more with Endsight. Reach out today.
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