While issues may start as minor irritations, over time, they can have a significant effect on your business operations, and this can end up reflected in your bottom line.

An efficient, effective phone system is a necessity for any mid-market business, and one that can’t keep up will place a stranglehold on growth. If you’re experiencing some frustration and wondering if it’s time to upgrade, then here are seven critical signs that your current phone system is harming your business.

Seven signs it’s time to change your business phone system

1. Your telephony costs are skyrocketing

A phone system may be a necessity, but that doesn’t mean you have to pay through the nose for it. Businesses often accept their bill, regardless of how much it costs or if it keeps creeping up, when it’s actually possible to reduce this spend drastically, by merely embracing newer technology. Switching from a traditional on-premise PBX to a cloud-based or hosted one using VoIP can save you as much as 80% on your phone bill.

2. Your telephone systems provide a poor client experience

While your phone system should offer a good user experience for your employees, you shouldn’t neglect your clients either. If clients find it difficult, time-consuming or confusing to try and reach the company via phone, then it reflects poorly on the business.

Consider what experience you would like your customer to have when they contact your business and compare this to what happens. Do you need an individual to monitor and manually transfer all incoming calls, and what happens if they’re busy with something else? Is it easy to transfer calls between staff or are they frequently dropped, requiring the client to call again? If you use call routing, does the call end up going to the right department or person?

Again, individually these might be minor frustrations, but if they happen every time a client tries to call it’s going to harm the business relationship in the long run.

3. You have issues with routing calls

A phone system with limited call routing and be difficult and time-consuming for clients to navigate. If a client has an urgent matter and wants to speak to their Account Manager, the last thing they need is to have to trawl through an endless maze of menus, entering long strings of digits and waiting on hold for extended periods.

If your current phone system doesn’t allow you to customise the call routing features, then it may be time to consider one that does. Even something as simple as being able to route calls based on the business’s operating hours, so out of hours callers have the option to leave a voicemail, can significantly enhance the calling experience for clients and prospects.

4. Your phone systems offer no geographical flexibility

The number of people working remotely may have exploded as the result of the pandemic, but it’s expected that this trend is here to stay for the long run. If your phone system ties you to a single geographic location, then you’re creating a scenario where employees can’t work effectively from home or on the road, or where they need to use a business or personal mobile to keep up with calls.

5. It’s challenging to add new users to your phone system

A mid-market, growth business can quickly outgrow its telephone infrastructure, leaving it struggling to cope with call volume and extra extensions. Traditional phone systems rely on SIP trunks and ISDN lines, and it can be difficult – not to mention expensive – to add new lines to cope with additional capacity. If you add a new office location, then you also need to buy new equipment and add that to the hardware refresh cycle.

6. Your phone system has limited call functionality

Call functionality is valuable for both your clients and your employees. For an optimal client experience, you need to be able to offer more than just the basic functions like mute and hold. If you’re using an auto-attendant program to route calls, do clients have the functionality to rehear the options? Can they easily return to a prior menu if they make a mistake, or do they have to hang up and start again?

Consider, also, the experience for the client once they’re on a call. Do you leave clients waiting in silence while on hold, or are they met with hold music? Do you automatically update them on their queue position and estimate wait time? Little touches like these can notably improve the call experience for the client by setting expectations from the start.

For employees, limited call functionality can seriously hamper their productivity. Limited numbers for conference calls, a lack of voicemail and landline limitations are just some of the things which can make it difficult for teams to work effectively together.

7. You don’t get any data and insights

Data and information are an asset within a business. If you can’t analyse your call statistics quickly and easily you are probably missing out on key data and information that can improve your business operations, sales and customer service.

Do you know key pieces of information, such as how many calls come into the business and each department? How many calls go unanswered? Who never answers the phone and who could be more productive if they weren’t fielding so many calls? Simple metrics like these can give you real insight and vision into your operations and many phone systems don’t have the capability to provide the data or it’s very costly.

What are my options for a new phone system?

If you can relate to one, or more, of these issues, then it’s a key indicator that it’s time to change your business phone system. It could be standing in the way of your business delivering an excellent experience for clients and even hampering your ability to win new business.

One popular solution is to consider switching to a VoIP telephone system, which leverages your existing internet connection, allowing you to make calls over the internet. It’s not only typically more cost-effective, but also offers greater flexibility, scalability and functionality when compared to a traditional on-premise telephone system.

If you want to find out more about VoIP and what’s involved in migrating your business to a new telephone system, then download our free guide for a comprehensive overview.

What are the most common problems with phone systems?

The specific problems with phone systems can vary, but they all impact the efficiency of operations and, ultimately, the bottom line. From overspending on hardware and system usage, through to providing a poor call experience to employees and clients alike, here are six of the most common problems mid-market businesses experience with their phone systems. 

1. Outdated hardware

Unfortunately, this will happen at some point. No piece of hardware is for ‘life’ and will require an upgrade. The average lifespan of a business phone system is around 6-8 years, at which point the system is either out of maintenance or is lagging in functionality.  

Ideally, you should aim to stay ahead of the curve and update your phone systems when you can, rather than pushing them to the absolute brink. While running your hardware for as long as possible may seem like a good idea, so you get the most value from your spend, this doesn’t result in the greatest return. As hardware ages, performance often suffers, and it can be more expensive to repair and update  

Alternatively, with software-based and hosted communication solutions you don’t need to have dedicated hardware in the server room because everything can run in the cloud. Even desk phones are not essential with cloud telephony systems, instead, an application (also known as a softphone or client) can allow end-users to transform their laptop, mobile or other smart devices into a business phone which they can take with them anywhere.  

2. Limited features

Modern phone solutions no longer offer just ‘voice’. They’ve transformed into full unified communication (UC) solutions, which offer a whole raft of productivity-enhancing features. Mobile apps, multi-site integrations, auto-attendants, call recording, click-to-dial, wallboards and call management are just some of the features which might improve your employees’ day-to-day activity – but they might not be available with your current phone system.  It’s typically these additional features that provide data for KPIs, which give businesses real insight into their operations, thus helping to drive transformation.  

3. Maxed out phone lines

Business is going great and you’ve decided to employ another sales executive to keep up with demand. But there’s a problem, you’ve maxed out the number of phone lines your system can take in.  

As businesses change and undertake digital transformation, it makes sense to invest in a phone system which can give you value right away but can easily scale with you too without an expensive upgrade path. VoIP can resolve these issues with its built-in flexibility and scalability, plus you’re not limited by physical location or installations.  

4. Expensive

Mid-market businesses understand the necessity of a phone system and as a result, often don’t question the cost – even where it’s eye-wateringly expensive. Some might not even be aware of what their phone system truly costs, especially when you start to incorporate some of the soft costs. 

If your business needs to forward international calls or transfer calls to mobiles, then monthly costs can soon rack up.  

5. Downtime takes you out completely

There’s no 100%, guaranteed protection against all downtime, but your business should prepare so you can still operate when it happens. If an outage occurs which takes down your phone system and you have no way to route those calls, then this not only impacts your clients but also means you could miss out on potential new business.  

6. It’s overly complex

A phone system is essential for day-to-day activity, so you don’t want a set-up which is so complex that employees can’t use it without consulting a manual. For a system which is used day-in, day-out by essentially every person in the business, you want something which is intuitive and easy to use. While you may need to provide some initial training on a new system, you should feel confident that afterwards employees will be able to use it effectively.  

What is the outcome for businesses? 

Even just experiencing one of two of these issues with your phone can have a significant impact on operations. Missed or dropped calls, poor client experience and limited functionality are all reflected in the bottom line, so it makes sense to invest in a phone system which can keep up with your business.  

VoIP is often a good alternative for mid-market firms. It offers the built-in flexibility and scalability which will address many of the issues which occur with traditional on-premise telephony. Any initial financial outlay will likely be recouped quickly by removing the soft costs poor experience incurs, plus your ongoing costs are likely to be significantly lower. 

Digital transformation and automation are hot topics – they’ve been hot topics in one guise or another since IT was born. But despite their proven effectiveness and capability to enhance the way a business operates; many businesses only pay lip service to improving their internal processes in earnest.

Why is this? The two most common reasons are that either they’ve been burned by a project or initiative that was sold to them using automation and digital transformation tags as buzzwords which then failed to deliver substantial results, or they’re distracted by the more visible (but less impactful) new campaigns being generated by marketing or sales.

This obsession with searching for new horizons whilst leaving the internal business to fall into disrepair is seen all too commonly. Even in manufacturing, companies who have been improving their production processes relentlessly for decades seem to have forgotten to apply the same fervour for efficiency gains in the back-office. There are huge gains to be made from automation, but it must be business-led and with a focus on ROI.

So, how do we begin?

1. Understand where you are

This early on, you shouldn’t be looking at the tools to conduct your automation. Nor should you even be looking for external consultants. You need to instead get a general feel for what could be improved and what should be improved in the business.

This is a straight forward exercise of breaking down the business into its component parts –  typically into departments. Then list all the business operations/processes within that department, such as client onboarding, lead-processing, invoice processing and debt collection.

You should then break down these processes into steps and actions. If you can use a flow-chart then great, else just map it out in a way that the team understands.

Regardless of what method you use, it is imperative that you are as precise and detailed as possible at this point in your journey. Every concurrent step follows on from this one, so ensure you start on steady footing. The more detail you add, the simpler it is to see areas that can be automated which saves future you time and other resources.

2. Determine priority areas

As you go through your analysis you’ll start to see areas that can be improved quickly. You’ll also typically see that many internal processes can be broken down into two core types of task – actions and approvals.

Taking a typical and traditional expenses procedure as an example: An employee would open an expenses sheet and enter the details of their claims, scan in all their receipts, print the form and receipts, sign the form, hand it to their line manager, they sign-it, it’s scanned back in and finally sent to accounts for payment.

You can see from this that even with simple tasks, there’s a good deal of steps and many opportunities for automation. However, there are also some stages that are impossible to automate – the signatures are a notable example. These can still be digitised, however.

The real purpose of this step is to gauge how and where automation/digitisation can make an impact. By identifying processes that have wide stretches of actions which could be automated or lots of approvals that could be digitised you can create a priority list of tasks that you should address to have the biggest impact. The more steps and touches by people the greater the potential impact.

3. Look at technology

Thanks to the rampant rise of technology and globalisation, you are likely to be able to find tools and applications that fit your requirements relatively easy.

Of course, many systems will be able to take over many parts of your operations and the processes within them. If you can find one system that can deliver greater efficiency and ultimately customer service then it’s potentially going to save you costs, integration headaches and upgrade hassles.

On the flip-side it’s important that during this stage you find a system that maps directly to your requirements, rather than trying to change your operations to fit a system – which can happen with complete business systems that blend various applications and operations, i.e. Practice Management Systems in law firms, ERP in manufacturing, etc.

You may have to create a blend of systems to deliver a highly configurable system. As in essence you then get a much more powerful solution that will deliver you greater results and potentially a greater edge over your competition. Lots of tiny improvements soon mount up into a measurable advantage.

A clear requirements analysis is really going to help you see the gaps when looking at software solutions and systems. Do understand that it’s common to buy a total business system and then not use large pieces of it because those parts don’t truly map to your operations, i.e. you use the accounting and service elements but don’t use the CRM functionality – potentially using a 3rd party solution that integrates better.

4. Plan the project

Once you’ve mapped out your processes, bundled them into relevant categories, evaluated where the big wins will come from and have a solid system/application more or less identified then you have a clear starting point. Now it’s time to look at the project delivery.

A clear time-bound plan along with sensible milestones is essential to deliver returns from a digitisation project. You should be working in conjunction with vendors and (if relevant) developers, along with internal affected teams to create a project plan that you all buy into and approve. It’s important to of course consider costs, not just the hard costs but also the soft-costs – which will often make or break a project in terms of delivering a business-enhancing result.

If you are looking at numerous digital transformation projects, it’s important not to fall into the trap of rolling out too many projects at once or back-to-back. Too many companies go for fork-lift upgrades where they change numerous projects at once and that can cause fatigue and frustration in the user base at best. Create a considered road-map that will give staff time to become accustomed to new ways of working or new systems before undertaking more change.

5. Go hard on testing

Testing can never be overrated. You can only ever deliver an effective digital transformation project through a rigorous and considered testing plan.

Ideally, you’ll be able to pilot the new process or system in a real-time test environment. That way you can see the difference whilst ironing out issues as you go, prior to a wide-scale rollout.

This is increasingly possible now since many applications and systems are now cloud-based, allowing you to trial a system in a fully-fledged test environment without signing up for long-term contracts.

If there isn’t a way to preview the effectiveness of the new process or system, it’s important to agree what success looks like with the vendor far in advance of signing an order or contract. Too many businesses sign-up on a sales person’s promise. A project can fail because clear deliverables aren’t agreed at the start.

If you have stakeholders, i.e. users of the system, ensure that they are happy with the testing. Without stakeholder and user group sign-off you can find yourself surrounded by disgruntlement and finger-pointing. Make sure you tie everyone into success.

6. Go Live

Once you’ve signed off your testing and pilot as a success, it’s time to finish your roll out and go live with your new system. If you’ve got to this stage successfully everyone should be raring to go (communication is everything) and fully trained.

You should now be following your project plan as you bring the solution live. It’s also important to document and analyse any issues that arose along the way. Discuss them in a ‘lessons learnt’ session with the project team during or after the rollout. We all grow through difficulties, and our experiences can help those who follow after us on other projects.

7. Evaluate success

After you’ve delivered your automation project it’s important to formally look back to what your objectives were at the beginning. Did you meet them? It’s also important to do a formal follow-up meeting. Ideally once everything has been running for a few months and then maybe after the first year.

If you can clearly demonstrate the value and business enhancement over a period that’s exciting. It will also transform a boards perception of IT. It will drive it to the centre of the board agenda – which it should be right now.

8. Start again

Digital transformation doesn’t have a clear end. It’s all about continual improvement and so should in effect be a never-ending cycle. It’s very unlikely that the change you have instilled is perfect and can’t be improved.

If you want to grow your competitive advantage and/or profit margin you should be managing change as you go; whilst also revisiting the whole process in specific time-frames. This could be every 3 months, 6 months, annually or longer if appropriate (unlikely).

Ideally, now you’ve gone through the motions, innovation, automation and transformation should have become part of your standard operations. Your board will hopefully be demanding it.

Conclusion

Digital transformation is without a doubt a buzz term. In reality, it’s LEAN and continual improvement rebadged. It’s something every business should be doing in a structured manner to survive and thrive in a global business environment. The challenges are there, but you can gain than ther is to fear.

Your business’ Internet connection now means so much more than just being able to browse websites. So many programs, services and features rely on an Internet connection that if yours went down, you would feel an instantaneous impact.

Businesses constantly use the Internet to communicate with their clients, collaborate with colleagues and access cloud-based systems such as Office 365 and Salesforce. Using the Internet is so ingrained in our workday, there’s little you could do without it.

• You couldn’t send or receive emails
• You couldn’t access any cloud application services or files in cloud storage
• You couldn’t access any websites or web services
• You probably couldn’t use your telephony system

The only good thing which comes from an Internet outage is… well, there isn’t one.

How much does a lost Internet connection cost?

Internet outages cost UK businesses nearly £7 billion in 2016. Whilst that was a few years ago, don’t think the age of this stat makes you safe. This figure is set to increase year-on-year and so will now be something far higher.

The table below shows the impact downtime has on varying sizes of businesses based on both the productive time lost and the cost of an outage.

Businesses experience an average of 4.7 outages per year – each of which cost a mid-sized business an average of £3,644.

Internet outages are clearly expensive and so your business should be doing everything to prevent them. Luckily, it’s not difficult to reduce the chance of your business seeing an outage.

How to prevent an Internet outage?

Difference between broadband, leased-lines and 4G services.

Before considering getting two Internet connections, you must ensure your primary connection is the correct type for your business. There are three main types of connection:

• Broadband – Generally only good for very small businesses. This is the same connection you likely have at home. Broadband connections share bandwidth with other customers meaning lower performance at peak times and fluctuating performance. Broadband typically has a non-existent Service Level Agreement (SLA). This means if you go down, you aren’t going to be a priority to the service provider. You may have an SLA in your contract, but they are typically valueless.
• Leased line – Good for growing and medium-sized businesses, necessary for large businesses. A leased-line is a private connection which only you can utilise – guaranteeing consistent performance. SLAs for leased lines operate more rigidly – giving you better uptime guarantees and faster resolutions when issues occur.
• 4G Connectivity – Good for satellite sites or rural offices. 4G has become a popular solution for certain niche scenarios such as remote offices or areas where other options are poor or non-existent. Although good in principle, 4G services are typically not enough for full business operations – though they can act as a lifeline if a wired connection fails.

Getting a second Internet connection

Once your primary connection is suitable, the second step is to add redundancy to your Internet connection. Many businesses think a leased line gives them immunity to an outage. However, while you may still get limited connectivity during a wider network outage, you should aim for no loss of service at all.

Since we operate leased lines for many of our clients, there are a few best practices and common mistakes we’ve seen which you should be aware of when planning your own leased line.

The Last Mile Rule

The ‘Last Mile Rule’ states that the final mile of cabling which connects your business to the Internet should be physically separate between your two connections. This isn’t always possible due to external infrastructure and costs, but it’s worth aiming for.

Having the connections enter your office from alternate directions and cabinets means a physical disruption (perhaps caused by overzealous construction workers) only impacts one cable – allowing you to maintain connectivity.

To take it further, a secondary Internet connection should be run from a different telephony exchange – meaning that an issue at an exchange doesn’t bring down your connectivity.

Automatic switching

Manually reacting to an outage is not ideal. It’s stressful, confusing and results in unnecessary downtime for your business. Instead, you want to configure your connection to automatically switch over to the secondary circuit if the primary one is down.

Typically, this is achieved by intelligent firewalls or two carriers (ISPs) working in conjunction via a managed service.

It’s also worth considering using the second connection, rather than just having it sat idle. Many organisations push certain traffic over the secondary connections, such as backups or voice calls. Obviously, if the second line fails (often more likely) that traffic can just fail-back to the primary connection.

Diversify line providers

Rather than going straight to your current line provider for your secondary connection, consider diversifying to another provider instead.

In the UK, BT Openreach and Virgin Media are the two largest owners of cable infrastructure, so if you already have a connection with one, it’s worth diversifying into the other. This is so that if the network provider themselves experiences an outage, you don’t lose your primary and secondary connections because of it.

Another benefit to a diverse approach is that if one of the major providers goes down, you can be overwhelmingly smug that your operations keep humming along whilst your competitors are frantically putting out fires and incurring reputational damage.

What is the cost of two Internet connections?

The direct cost of a second Internet connection will vary depending on local pricing so research your providers. If an identical line is too expensive, you could consider purchasing a reduced capacity line instead, i.e. a broadband circuit to just allow critical services to run in a disaster.

Doing this ensures a primary line failure won’t completely take you down, but you may find it difficult to perform Internet-heavy actions. Consider how much bandwidth you use normally and your usage at peak times to help you choose a sufficiently effective backup line.

What is the ROI of a second connection?

A second Internet connection is a preventative investment, meaning you cannot calculate ROI in the traditional sense. Instead, look at how much money your business is losing from downtime, then map this against the cost of a backup line.

As medium-sized businesses typically lose £3,644 per outage and experience 4.3 outages per year, a secondary connection would save them £15,699.20 on average every year. This can be considered the yearly ROI.

To calculate this for your own business, use this simple downtime cost equation to find your cost of downtime then multiply it by the average length of your outages and multiply it again by your average number of outages per year.

It’s also important to not just focus on the hard costs. You also need to consider soft costs, such as reputational damage. If your operation was offline for 3 days (very possible) then how is that going to impact your reputation?

Does my business need two Internet connections?

This question is akin to asking, “does my business need to be accessible to clients and customers?” or “do my employees need to do their work?”. If you’re a micro-business, then you can probably get away with a single connection because downtime losses are minimal. But otherwise, it becomes not a question of if you should get two Internet connections, but when you should get your second connection.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking a disaster won’t happen to you. Too many businesses put off investing in their business continuity and then take a permanent blow to their reputation rather than enjoying business as usual. Don’t let that be you. 

Switching IT support provider is not a decision to be taken lightly but it is often a decision born from necessity rather than from choice. The perceived pain of changing support providers often paralyses businesses – leading them to endure the inept service until things become too costly to continue.

Often, the incompetence of a provider becomes apparent immediately after their service begins, but it can also arise part way through the contract if something changes within their business. Worst of all though is when signs of incompetence are hidden or the business is unaware of what these signs even are.

Finding out if your provider is up to scratch is hard. Reviews can be faked and asking them will give an inevitably positive answer. But there are some red flags you can be on the lookout for which indicate it’s time to switch.

10 reasons you should switch IT support provider

1. They don’t deliver tangible business results

Your IT support provider should provide you with a measurable return on investment (ROI).

If their strategic consultancy consists of pushing the latest tech and something vaguely labelled as ‘the cloud’ or you can describe their technical support as ‘keeping the lights on’, they’re not worth the money you’re spending on them.

Additionally, if the ROI they deliver is defined in vague terms rather than strict measurements, it can signal problems. Whilst you may be “more available” thanks to that second Internet line they installed, what matters is whether they can tell you when it saved you from an outage and how much money you avoided losing due to reduced downtime. If they can do this, it shows they not only understand your business enough to provide you with these hard numbers, but they’re focused on the metrics which matter to your business and not just tech for tech’s sake.

For the most value to your business, your provider should also follow continual improvement frameworks such as ISO 27001. Without continual improvement, their strategic guidance will eventually become too diluted and you will be better off moving to a new provider.

Find out if your IT support provider is truly delivering measurable value with a cost-neutral Value Enhancement Audit

2. They don’t understand your business sector

There is an oversaturation of generalist IT providers on the market right now and whilst they might be able to fix your PC when it breaks, they’re unlikely to be able to advise on implementing a law firm’s practice management system or fuelling a manufacturer’s lean initiatives with technology.

To provide effective guidance, your provider needs to understand the challenges and opportunities available right now within your sector. That means they should be attending events and expos in your sector, hosting events relevant to your sector and speaking in your sector’s language.

At its simplest, it may be better to look at it from the other way around. If you’re in a regulated industry and your provider doesn’t understand your industry, their lack of awareness will prevent them from creating solutions that are even allowed to be implemented. And if they can’t do something as basic as that, how can they make changes which drive value for your customers?

A provider who doesn’t understand your business is fine for day-to-day maintenance since that only requires an understanding of tech. But for even a modicum of business value, you need a provider who understands your sector. If you get this, you’ll be able to form an IT partnership that motivates true business outcomes, driving you and your business forward.

3. They don’t take security seriously themselves

It’s genuinely alarming to see the number of IT support providers who are not cyber-secure. An immense amount of trust is needed between a support provider and their client and if a support provider isn’t covering their own security, that’s a grossly negligent breach of that trust.

If your IT provider isn’t following security best practices (Cyber Essentials Plus, patch management, zero-trust e.t.c.), then it’s best to leave before a disaster occurs. Imagine how angry you would be at your IT support provider if they left your client database misconfigured and allowed for those details to be stolen and sold by criminals. Now take that anger, multiply it by your number of clients and direct it at yourself. Not a fun thought.

Knowingly using an insecure support company makes you just as bad as them if something goes wrong. And when your clients get angry at you for leaking their data or the board demands to know who is responsible for the ransomware infection which took down operations for a week, they are completely justified in that anger.

4. They won’t accept responsibility

There is a shared responsibility between an IT support provider and their client. The support provider is responsible for understanding the client’s risk profile and ensuring systems are kept at optimal performance and the client has the responsibility to act on the advice provided by the support company and operate to the standards given through the provider’s consultancy.

If one party is not completing their responsibilities, then relationships can easily break down. When something goes wrong, clients are obliged to prove how they adopted the provider’s advice and operated to a certain level and providers are obliged to explain why things went wrong, how it’s being fixed and how it will be prevented in the future.

If whenever something goes wrong, they instead blame you (and you have taken their guidance) or indicate it’s not their problem or refuse to offer solutions whilst insisting the fault lies with someone other than themselves, it’s time to move on.

5. They focus on contractual details

All good IT support providers know that when their clients are successful, they are successful. So, if you often hear “we don’t cover that” or “that’s not in your contract”, it indicates they aren’t interested in supporting your business or they are incompetent.

Of course, if you signed on for a contract that specifically doesn’t offer support for phone lines, don’t expect them to help you with your phone lines. But if they treat their relationship with you as purely transactional rather than as a partnership, it’s an indication you should switch.

For edge cases, a good provider will lean on your side and assist with the issue since they understand the importance of building their relationship with you. Providers who abide by strict contractual details are often the ones who only see your business as a source of monthly recurring revenue instead of as a partner and so would only see this help as an ‘expense’.

6. You have outgrown them

If your business goes through a period of rapid growth, it’s possible to become too big for your current IT support provider to handle. Since the alternative is purposely stagnating your business to let your provider catch up, changing support provider is the obvious course of action.

It’s not easy to measure if you have outgrown your provider. But judging by how you’re currently reading an article about switching providers, it’s possible you’re already at that point. There are a few things to look for which indicate you’ve outgrown your provider:

• They are falling behind on tickets and are starting to miss SLAs
• There’s less confidence in the support provider amongst your staff
• They aren’t helping you with your IT strategy anymore and are solely focused on fixing problems
• Their strategic guidance looks at things from too much of a narrow viewpoint

If you’re seeing any of these, it’s possible that your provider is unable to effectively manage the requirements of your business. If that is the case, it’s time to switch.

7. They talk tech

It’s easy for someone without a technical background to get overwhelmed by the acronyms and terminology used by IT support companies. If your support provider is speaking in tongues, it may be time to get an exorcist, if they’re talking tech though, it may be worth looking for an exit.

Tech for tech’s sake is what brought about the downfall of Business Intelligence in the 80s and 90s and so any provider who is still pushing the latest shiny gizmos is either still stuck in the 90s or hasn’t learned that what businesses want is results, not new hardware.

Your IT support provider shouldn’t just be speaking in the language of business though, they should also be talking the language of your sector. If they understand the unique risks and rewards your business has, they will be much better equipped to deal with those and create optimised solutions.

8. You aren’t learning

When was the last time your IT support provider told you that you were wrong (and not in the “you don’t get tech” way), explained why and then helped you create a better outcome with their guidance?

Have they ever done that?

If you aren’t learning by working with your IT support provider, they either aren’t challenging you enough or they don’t know any more about technology than you do. In either case, you should consider switching to a different provider.

Innovation only comes when the status quo is challenged and so if your support provider isn’t bringing new ideas or thinking of ways technology can help you exploit opportunities in your sector, you’re likely to stagnate.

It’s key though that the things you are learning are relevant to your business. If your provider is just going too in-depth with tech then that comes back around to point 7.

9. They’ve been bought out or merged

The acquisition of your support provider by another company should put you on high alert. Not only will there be a period of disturbance during the merge, but culture, leadership, pricing and SLAs can all shift – leading a drastic change in the quality of the service you have come to expect.

With the sudden convergence of the two providers, you may also find yourself becoming a lower priority client – further impacting your response times and availability of resources.

Shortly after a merge is also a common time for members of the leadership team or founders to leave the company. If this occurs, you may find for example that the CEO who prioritised long-term relationships with clients is replaced with one who prioritises short-term profits instead.

If after a merger or acquisition of your support provider, you find yourself dissatisfied with the service, it’s time to look for a new provider.

10. They’re much cheaper than the competition

This may seem like a reason to stay with your provider, but it absolutely isn’t. IT support is not a commodity where each offering is identical, it’s a knowledge-based service and therefore follows the rule of cost = quality. Saying you have the cheapest IT support just means you have the worst IT support.

If your IT support provider is the cheapest on the market, ask yourself what corners are they cutting to reduce prices? Of course, you have a budget to keep in mind, but when you’re presented with a cheap break-fix provider and a more expensive proactive supplier, don’t immediately discount the latter based on flat costs.

What next?

It’s unfortunate to see that 69% of businesses change support provider every year. This raises serious concerns because without a long-term relationship, how can a company get genuine results and coherent strategic guidance from its IT provider? The relationship between a company and their support provider has to be forged on partnership. But this statistic indicates support providers aren’t doing enough to create value for their clients.

If you think it’s time to review your provider, we believe you should choose a new one who is able to engage for the long term.

There are a few factors to consider before choosing your new provider though. Location, sector focus and service scope.

Location

This used to be one of the most important factors to look for, but modern support providers can fix most problems remotely. What’s more, having the ‘IT guy’ swing by each morning to see if anything is broken is a sign your provider lacks proactive maintenance and monitoring capabilities, rather than indicating anything good.

Whilst it’s wise to keep your support provider local enough to send an engineer in an emergency, you no longer need to limit yourself to just providers in your town, city or even county.

Sector focus

This is now a far more important factor when choosing a provider. With a glut of generalists on the market, if a support provider focuses on your sector, you should give them real consideration. Their specialist knowledge and experience make them much better suited to assist your business and their connections to people in your industry may provide additional benefits.

Service-scope

Finally, service-scope means what the provider defines as IT support. If the provider defines IT support as fixing things when they break, they aren’t worth your time or money. If they define it as keeping systems running and always in peak performance, they might be worth consideration. But if they define it as keeping things running, always in peak performance and backed by an ongoing strategy, you’ve hit gold.

If you’re searching for a better IT support provider, our Total Service package provides the comprehensive support and consultancy you’ve been searching for. If you’re not quite ready to make the switch yet, book an online review to discuss your challenges with us.

Here’s an important question for you: Do you only eat your lunch after having died from starvation?

You will have likely answered “no” to that question, so here’s another one for you. Do you only fix your IT issues after they cause damage to your business?

You probably said “no” again. But unless you’re using proactive IT support, you should be saying “yes” instead because this is exactly what you’re doing. Waiting until the worst has happened before addressing a problem.

What is reactive IT support?

Reactive support (sometimes called break/fix support) is where the focus is on fixing IT issues after they occur, instead of preventing them from occurring in the first place.

For a long time, reactive support was the only type of IT support possible. But with modern analytics and systems management tools, better monitoring and even the rise of AI-enhanced predictive models, proactive support is now not only possible but widely available.

Yet despite the proactive model being available, many businesses continue using reactive support – often unaware of the damage it’s causing them.

Their choice of IT provider is most often to blame since the cheapest support rarely offers even a hint of proactivity. Instead, cheap providers favour the legacy break/fix approach as it allows them to get better margins on their clients.

Why is a reactive approach not good enough anymore?

1. Leaves the core of the business vulnerable

IT is vital to every department and process within a business. So, if there’s a problem with IT, there’s a direct business impact. This can range from being a simple inconvenience right through to a complete halt of operations. Accompanied by the typical reputational damage.

With a reactive approach, these problems both large and small can arise far more often. This isn’t necessarily because reactive support is worse at fixing problems, but because reactivity is worse at dealing with them.

With a reactive approach, an issue needs to be actively causing pain before it’s addressed. And this results in far more issues reaching employees.

Compared to the proactive approach’s continual improvement mindset, reactivity is also lacking. For a start, a reactive approach has no way to stop issues before they begin impacting the business. Reactivity also lacks the ability to apply past experience from one client to another. Eliminating most common issues completely.

With so many things going for proactivity, it seems like it should be the default. But it’s an approach that many IT providers only pay lip service to. Only with a focus on continual improvement, along with ensuring all systems are proactively monitored can an IT provider call themselves proactive. But once they do, many problems can be fixed long before their effects become visible. Reducing potential damage and minimising employee downtime.

2. Negligent to your clients/customers

By the time a reactive IT support provider begins addressing an issue, your customers or clients will already be feeling the negative effects. Perhaps a crypto-jacking infection on your web server is causing your website to become unresponsive, locking out customers. Or a failed piece of hardware has meant critical client assets are lost. These sorts of issues occur far more often with a reactive approach in place and can have major ramifications for your business.

The largest of these is that outages = lost clients. We live in a time where every business is commoditised. So if you experience frequent issues due to reliance on reactive IT support, your clients can and will switch to your competitors.

Additionally, if you have SLAs with clients, failing to meet them due to a spotty service can have direct financial repercussions. But needing to compensate your clients will not cost you a great deal but will also erode trust, resulting in further problems.

3. Allows issues to grow out of hand

With a reactive approach, issues are only fixed once they’re having an impact on your business. This means that a problem which has no immediately visible impact can go unnoticed until it’s far too late. Here are a couple of examples of the sort of things which can go wrong.

A few hours before going out to meet a prospect, a director’s laptop locks up with a message stating she must pay a ransom to unencrypt her data. Clearly the victim of a ransomware attack, the director is dismayed to find it has encrypted the files she needs for her meeting.

Upon recovering the files from their nightly backup, the company finds that the latest snapshot was actually several weeks old. The nightly backup had been encountering an error and failing each night. Without proactive monitoring in place to spot this issue, weeks of data were lost including the files she needed for her prospect.

On Monday morning, the finance department finds they can’t access their finance software and are all seeing an identical error code. Upon calling their reactive support desk they discover that the error code means that the software’s licence key has expired. It takes a day to renew the licence key and costs a considerable amount to do so. Due to no proactivity in relation to managing licenses, a whole day of productivity is lost and the unexpected cost takes a chunk out of the department’s budget.

A final point here: with a reactive support provider, there’s no guarantee that an issue fixed once is fixed for good or across all systems. Without proactivity, the same issue can arise many times, needing to be fixed from the ground up each time.

A proactive IT provider will instead flag the example issues as non-conformances due to their impact. Then, by putting controls in place, they would ensure that the issue won’t happen again not only for the affected client but for any of their clients. This prevents wasting resources on readdressing issues whilst also ensuring you’re always becoming more resilient to issues.

4. Blind to vulnerabilities

When most businesses think of cyber-attacks, they think of ransomware or DDoS attacks, both of which are very visible. But, most malware is designed to stay hidden on a network for as long as possible. Stealing as much data as it can or working its way up the chain of permissions to execute a catastrophic blow.

With the average compromised system staying undetected for 146 days, having no active monitoring due to reliance on reactive support is a dangerous choice to make. By leaving yourself blind to hidden vulnerabilities due to a lack of active monitoring, the impacts of a breach can also become far worse.

• Hidden spyware can steal more data, resulting in more affected clients and a larger GDPR fine.
• Hidden ransomware can move further laterally across the network before striking. Increasing the number of files locked and the ransom cost.
• Hidden crypto-jacking can wear down hardware and reduce employee productivity for longer.
• Hidden viruses can establish themselves far deeper within a device. Increasing the time and money required to remove it.

Lacking proactive monitoring and system vulnerability scanning allows these threats and more to stay on your network for far longer. Putting your business at a much greater level of risk than it needs to be. But with proactive monitoring and regular vulnerability scans, you can identify these risks and remediate them far quicker.

5. Normalises failure

When using reactive IT support, issues will often be common, recurring and irritating. The sheer volume of these small problems can easily overwhelm employees, causing them to either just get used to it or leave the company. Neither outcome is ideal.

In the case of employees who leave, a replacement must be found and retrained. But even after this, they will still have a chance of leaving the company for the same reasons.

Considering that the cost to replace a well-trained employee can exceed twice their yearly salary, high turnover can be catastrophic for your cashflow.

As for employees who get used to the issues, they may end up causing you more financial damage than those who leave…

6. Kills efficiency

With a reactive approach, each small issue needs an employee to take time out of their day to deal with it, instead of it being pre-emptively resolved.

Whether through having to call the reactive service desk or from reduced productivity whilst dealing with the issue. Even only a few minutes of disturbance per issue can make the wasted time mount up.

For example, if each small problem takes 5 minutes to identify, diagnose and fix and each employee experiences only one issue per day. A company with 40 employees will lose 16 hours and 40 minutes each workweek.

Extending this over a month, the company will lose 66 hours and 40 minutes. And over a year, 800 hours will be wasted. The same as having an employee lay on the floor all day, for 100 days whilst on full pay.

It’s also worth remembering that without proactive management, the same issues can keep recurring. From this, it should be easy to see how lost time can pile up, causing a significant impact on a business’s operations.

7. Proactivity is possible

This list could have consisted of this point alone because the simple fact that proactivity is possible should be enough of a reason to change to it. However, this wouldn’t have been very informative to you, the reader. Nor would it highlight the potential dangers of continuing to use the reactive model.

When comparing the two models, it’s not even a matter of weighing up the pros and cons. The proactive model is a direct upgrade. For one final analogy, it’s like determining whether to use a Palaeolithic hand axe (see: sharp rock) or a chainsaw to cut down a tree.

It’s also worth noting here that many IT support providers sell themselves as being proactive when in truth they’re not. It may be that their monitoring is proactive or one part of their operations. But this alone does not mean they are proactive.

You should aim to understand how your IT system is managed since this shows you what gains can be made with some quick initial changes.

What is a CIO?

If you don’t know what a CIO is, or want a refresh, check out our existing article on the role of a CIO. Since this article is aimed at businesses who are aware of what a CIO is but want to know if they need one, we won’t be covering it here.

Does my business need a CIO?

A widely held notion is that only large, multi-national corporations need the service of a CIO. This may have been true a decade or so ago, but with IT now central to the whole business it’s no longer the case.

The skills of a CIO are now useful to any size or type of business from a 50 person legal firm to a 300 person manufacturing business.

So then, if every business can have a CIO, how do you know if you need one? Here are some key indicators you can look for which show you’re ready for a CIO:

1. You lack the information to make business decisions

When there are plans to make a change in the business, a lack of data and information can plunge even a good idea into uncertainty. Lacking the knowledge for major IT-related business decisions results in project delays. And when the time does come to choose, it’s a decision made on the promises of a salesperson rather than on proven facts.

These factors often limit the scope and effectiveness of projects. Resulting in a lower value or poor performing outcome.

A CIO helps by de-risking the decision-making process. By using their knowledge of technology and the wider business, they can find a solution that has its base in hard facts and proven performance, rather than going by guesswork and hope.

The CIO also gives an amount of certainty to making IT-related business decisions. This can help drive change and adoption, giving you an edge over your competitors who may be uncertain about how to review and apply new technologies such as AI or initiatives such as process improvement and automation to their business.

2. There is friction between departments

When one system or department’s poor performance and operations restrict the ability of another department to get work done, animosity and frustration can arise. This friction is often made worse by siloed departments. This causes rifts of communication, priorities and strategy to form and makes employees feel like they are fighting against their co-workers to get work done.

By being a mediator who ties together the IT and operations sides of the business, a CIO can help reverse this friction. Producing a unified strategy and operating environment means employees will be working towards a complementary outcome. And since everyone will be working in tandem, the likelihood of bottlenecks forming is also reduced.

Finally, because the CIO is in a neutral position, not aligned to any specific department they can be an impartial judge over which department is in the most need of IT resources and systems.

By relying on the facts and listening to each case, they can determine whose requests and priorities to address first. Rather than having each department claim that they are in the most need.

3. There are regular complaints about IT system performance

When constant IT issues are occurring, employee performance will decrease. For a 40-employee firm, even five minutes of disturbance per employee per day will waste over 16 hours a week.

A CIO will listen to the complaints being made and use their knowledge to identify and address the root of the problem. Be that through their own team, a service provider or a software vendor.

This not only minimises employee’s frustrations but it also improves their efficiency. Making a difference to your bottom line.

A CIO can also help you understand where issues might arise in the future as your business grows. They have the expertise and experience to know when you’ll meet friction and pain from an IT or operational standpoint. Allowing them to smooth out the road before you get there.

4. The business is going through a period of change

When your business is experiencing change (moving premises, going through a merger or acquisition, moving to the cloud, expanding teams, e.t.c.) there can be uncertainty around the potential threats which arise and unseen opportunities which pass by. Large scale change in the business’ use of IT can also create unease from a strategic standpoint.

A CIO has the experience, skills and expertise required to get things done in this situation. And thanks to their knowledge of both IT and business, they’re able to take advantage of the opportunities and mitigate the threats which may arise during a period of change.

5. You don’t understand the benefits IT can bring / You see IT as a necessary evil

When a business sees IT as a necessary evil, it’s inevitable that they’ll commit the least money, time and effort towards it. But businesses which do this only end up handicapping themselves since IT is not only ‘a cost’. Instead it’s the main area where you can gain a competitive advantage in the modern business arena.

The ‘IT is a cost’ mindset arose in the early 2000s due to a decline in business intelligence and a lack of understanding in what IT is. Investments were being made based on trends and hype, not fact. And when people were burned by their mistakes, it leads them to think of IT as a waste of resources.

The CIO helps bring back the business focus and knowledge that so many businesses have lost. Allowing IT to once again become a performance enabler.

Through wise technology investments, addressing deficiencies and ensuring that the IT strategy aligns with the strategy of the wider business, the CIO can re-kindle faith in IT and drive it back into the heart of the business, where true business gains lie.

6. No one in the C-suite is excited about IT

When there is no interest, there is no innovation.

There needs to be someone on your board who is excited about the potential of IT. Without this momentum, you risk projects being put on the backburner or dropped altogether. Slowing your pace of innovation, or even causing stagnation.

So in a world where you either innovate or go out of business, the CIO’s interest and proven experience in technology are vital.

By staying abreast of the latest trends and opportunities a CIO can ensure you’re always getting a business advantage. And with their understanding of the business applications of IT, new technologies and systems can deliver improved business processes and productivity. Giving you a competitive edge.

How big of an investment is a CIO?

To hire an in-house CIO, you can expect to be paying a salary of ~£150,000 per year. And for a highly qualified candidate, up to £240,000 per year – almost a quarter of a million.

A CIO’s salary is likely to eclipse that of any existing senior IT employees you already have such as an IT Director or Chief Technology Officer. It may also surpass many of your other C-level executive’s salaries as well. This is because the role demands a blending of technical and business knowledge alongside at least a decade of experience in similar roles and so employees can command a premium for their employment.

If you’re unable to part with this much cash or are already concerned about cash flow, you may now be thinking that a CIO is out of reach. Fortunately, there’s a second and increasingly popular route: a CIO service.

Because a CIO service has many clients, you get to benefit from the economies of scale which allows prices to be much lower on average.

Combined with how you only pay for the time you use their consultancy, rather than a yearly salary, a CIO service will typically be far more accessible than an in-house employee; all whilst offering the same benefits.

On the ‘business’ side you have the long term business strategy and plans or business requirements. On the other side lies the IT function.

This visible gap is where misalignment begins, but it’s often compounded by the negative preconceptions each side holds of the other.

Why does disconnect matter?

IT is an essential component of every business operation today. It is critical to the success of the business and so a lack of alignment between business and IT strategies can deal a heavy blow to the bottom line.

All too often, IT strategy is an afterthought – something bolted onto the wider business plan. This can result in overly complex infrastructures or systems that are difficult to change – making it a struggle to maintain and enhance business operations later on.

However, and perhaps more critically, misalignment can leave the business vulnerable.

The way IT interconnects with almost every business operation naturally results in an increased risk profile. Previously when talking about IT, we simply meant hardware and networks – things for providing a means to process, backup and safely store data. Now our expectations are much greater. We demand more information, more complex analytical reporting, greater integration, and increased data storage capabilities. Then on top of that, we demand that everything is kept easily accessible and highly secure.

What problems does disconnect cause?

The evolving dependence of the business on IT means IT events – data loss, corruption, security breaches and infrastructure failures – can no longer be confined to the department in which they occurred. When one of these IT events occurs now, the whole organisation’s productivity, reputation and ability to achieve strategic goals are hampered.

Yet despite this, many business leaders still aren’t considering aligning IT risk management with strategic business initiatives. Instead, they choose to rely on a traditional approach combining a cost-based analysis of ‘what may go wrong’ with metrics based on historic KPIs.

Such an approach can be unreliable as it’s too narrow to effectively identify and manage risk. Risks that fall outside the conventional realm – like fires, floods and power failures – can be easily overlooked. Furthermore, it fails to demonstrate how risks can affect the likelihood of achieving strategic objectives because it does not establish links between them. This contravenes ISO 31000 which emphasises risk management as a strategic function to enable businesses to make risk-adjusted decisions, rather than a compliance-orientated one.

Now, this isn’t to say that the act of quantifying and qualifying factors is not useful, as it most certainly is. Instead, the key takeaway is that to effectively identify the risk of IT, the use of a broader view is required. One which goes beyond traditional standards and aligns IT use with the strategic aims of the business.

How can I counter disconnect?

Instead of only looking at the financial impact of physical and natural threats to IT service delivery, you must broaden the spectrum and consider the impact or contribution each one will have to the achievement of strategic goals.

The positives of this approach are numerous. Firstly, by aligning risk techniques to strategic business initiatives, organisations can better document key performance indicators (KPIs) and key risk indicators (KRIs). These metrics are vital to continually monitor risk, providing an early warning system for a potential risk before it occurs.

Secondly, with a greater understanding of the business’ tolerance to risk, it is easier to implement a more realistic and balanced strategy and distribute clear communication plans. This helps protect your brand and shield against potential reputational/financial damage which can arise from IT events – for example, a poorly planned cloud migration resulting in significant disruption to customers.

This approach also delivers a significant competitive advantage by helping businesses to make calculated responses to risk that others in their industry may lack the insight to make. However, this does rely on KRIs being implemented and used properly. These indicators must provide an alert of emerging risk in good time, so the business has time to react and make appropriate decisions. Thereby reducing the potential negative impact on achieving strategic goals.

Another task you will need to undertake is addressing the original cause of disconnect on an employee level by cutting out the stereotypes executives and the IT department have of one another. Ensuring that each group sees value in each other is often a task that falls onto the shoulders of the CIO who acts as a bridge between the IT and business aspects of your organisation. But the responsibility also lies with every individual to ensure that they are working towards a common goal in the business.

IT risk will always exist in some form, but by improving alignment this can be continually monitored and communicated meaningfully to stakeholders. A proactive risk approach will enable the business to operate more cost-effectively, become more agile and respond to change with more informed, measured decisions.

It’s concerning how few businesses understand how much downtime costs, be it for an hour, a week or a day.

Fortunately, understanding these costs at a notepad level is easy and having the figures on hand allows you to make measured business decisions about how much to spend to improve your operations and to mitigate risks.

Many businesses assume they could survive with a day’s worth of downtime. However, they don’t factor in the true cost in terms of lost revenue and fixed costs, such as salaries and utilities.

Here are some basic calculations to help you work out how much downtime would actually cost your business.

How to calculate lost revenue to downtime

Often, when calculating the cost of an IT outage or other disaster, businesses will just look at their fixed costs such as the cost per hour of staff. However, the real cost comes from the lost earnings and revenue. The calculation is simple at a basic level:

As an example, if your business usually makes £200,000 per week over 40 working hours, a single hour’s outage will result in a loss of £5,000. That would be £40,000 a day.

Of course, the type of business is a factor. If it’s a law firm, you’re likely looking at the flat calculation above. If you’re an estate agency you may still be able to operate for a few days as your diary and contacts have been synchronised to local devices. However, you will be losing money regardless of if you can scrape by.

How to calculate fixed costs

During an outage you can’t send your employees home without pay, nor can you just skip the building’s rent for that day. In many business sectors, a serious IT outage will impact a large percentage of the workforce. A few will be fighting fires, but many will be idle and this is where the bulk of fixed costs will come from.

A simple calculation for fixed costs is:

As an example, if you have 50 staff and on average they are paid £20 an hour you’d be losing £1,000 an hour. That would be £8,000 for a day’s outage.

In short…

If you use the figures above, you’d be losing £6,000 an hour for a business turning over ~£10 million. Although the calculations are basic, they give insight into the fundamental costs which is enough to start informing your decision-making process regarding business continuity and disaster recovery.

You’d also need to look at other areas where you’d lose money – you could have reputational damage, recovery costs, etc. But it’s unlikely that you’d need to go into such detail to make measured decisions on how you’re going to control the areas of risks within your business.

You can certainly dive deeper and look at the cost per individual IT system, as these calculations are a good starting point to understand what you need to – and should be – doing to protect your business.

Thanks to the rapid development in technology and the ever-decreasing costs, controlling these risks for a sensible cost is a reality. A £10 million business should be able to protect their IT systems for the cost of a few hours downtime or less.

You may dread hearing “infrastructure refresh” or “systems update”, but if you want to remain competitive then you need to invest in your IT systems.

As your business grows, your needs and priorities will change. An increased headcount, technical advancements or market pressures could put pressure on systems that may have been perfect when starting out, but are now starting to restrict the business and hamper operations, agility and growth.

If you aren’t running a rolling IT upgrade program within the business then you will be building up technical debt that will often cost you more in the long run. You may think it’s okay to sweat an asset for another year, but often it brings with it a number of issues:

• Increases the risk profile as aged systems are more prone to failure.
• You miss out on technological advances that deliver greater value and returns versus the legacy asset.
• Greater disruption when a delayed change happens versus a steady and rolling investment and upgrade cycle.

If you’re holding back on investing in your IT systems, then you could be missing out on increased efficiency, productivity and often a competitive advantage. In today’s blog, we’ll show you the benefits you will achieve if you regularly invest in your IT systems.

What are the benefits of investing in your IT systems?

1. Competitive advantage

IT is now the beating heart of most businesses, both in terms of driving internal efficiencies and enhancing productivity, right through to improving customer and supplier engagements on the front-end of the business.

The pace of change is so significant that gains are always there for the taking. Of course, that doesn’t mean to say you upgrade every year. But too many businesses are sat on dated systems that are holding back business growth. It’s clear to see and proven in most sectors that those at the top are those who invest wisely in IT. Not those who sweat their IT assets, specifically in terms of their business systems, i.e. ERP, CRM, case management systems and the like.

It’s also important to note that technology and systems is a key differentiator and certainly an area which potential customers look at when choosing between companies. It could be as simple as one business has a better web portal than another.

2. Business agility

The ability to respond to changing business needs in an ever-complex world is key to success, and technology plays a key role in this. It goes hand in hand with collaboration, which leads to streamlined processes and more efficient projects. From unified communications through to CRM systems, technology must be a key part of your strategy, if you want an agile business. Other areas to consider are IT platforms built around mobility, cloud, big data, artificial intelligence, block-chain and social networking which can play a transformational role in a growing business.

3. Employee morale

The level of technology within a business certainly affects morale. It’s crude, yet true that staff include the IT environment when evaluating their position within a business. The IT environment is where the majority of office-based workers spend their days. If the equipment or systems are dated then when comparing their role to their peers. it does play a factor, in terms of morale. It’s as simple as one employee in one business drives a new company car whilst another sits in a 5-year-old, high mileage one. It matters to people.

4. Greater efficiency and productivity

New technology, where there is a clear business case along with the right technology, delivers efficiency and productivity. It’s what IT and computing, in general, was created to do – automate and improve manual processes and operations. Businesses should regularly measure where they are and what a new system could deliver compared to sitting still. You don’t always have to change – but first you should understand if there is an advantage to be gained.

5. Security

You wouldn’t leave your office unlocked, so why would you leave your IT environment open to security violations? It’s important that you regularly undertake a risk analysis to identify new issues and continually invest to mitigate them. The security landscape is changing rapidly now, the threat landscape from one quarter to the next can be dramatically different.

It could be as simple as the need for multi-factor authentication. Passwords alone are really not secure enough, but requiring staff to use a key fob when logging in or accessing certain areas is an easy way to add an extra layer of security. Depending on your business, you may also need to look at secure communications to protect your voice, video, email and text conversations. The rise of GDPR obviously brings in other areas to address, particularly around encryption and control. Failure to invest can cost a business on many fronts.

Conclusion

If you actively invest in your IT systems, it will help increase productivity, enhance data security and expand storage capacity. All of these elements will naturally contribute to higher revenue and profits as your business becomes more efficient and streamlined.

However, remember the key is making the right investments. Technology trends come and go, so do seek out the advice of an experienced technology consultant when considering an investment.