If you had to be honest with yourself, does your technology strategy revolve around your business’ plans, or is it tied more closely to your inevitable hardware failures? Many businesses still operate in the break-fix sense. When a laptop breaks, they replace it… but this reactive spending is costing your business in the long run, and it all but ensures you’re two steps behind. To stay competitive, you need tech goals that align with your business, supported by a Virtual Chief Information Officer who understands your business inside and out.
Today, we want to cover the three most notable reasons why your IT infrastructure should follow your business roadmap, not the hardware failure schedule, as well as how a vCIO can help you achieve this goal.
With the traditional setup, your business might be having technological conversations about specs, but a vCIO shifts the discussion to focus more on where you want your business to be in the near future.
When procurement is aligned with business goals, your success loop looks a lot different. You start with the business goal, then purchase technology in response to that goal. If you want to double your headcount and go fully remote in the next three years, your tech decisions should reflect that goal; you might implement more cloud-based solutions than hardware-based ones, and you might make investments into smart devices and laptops rather than in-house networking.
By aligning these purchasing decisions with desired outcomes, you will make better decisions that let you get the best ROI from your technology.
When we say “technology debt,” we’re referring to your business maintaining old systems well past their prime just to avoid an expensive upgrade.
Heed this warning: eventually, maintaining these systems will cost you more than acquiring a new one, especially when you factor in downtime, slow speeds, and security gaps. A vCIO helps you avoid this fate by building out a 5-year lifecycle plan that includes predictable hardware replacement, budget-leveling, and maximizing ROI on your IT. You’ll replace your hardware on a schedule rather than in the event of an emergency, and you should see your IT budget stabilize quickly.
In other words, you’re not dwelling on the past; you’re thinking about the future, which is exactly where your business wants to be.
The biggest hurdle for any IT decision-maker is often the “language barrier.”
The reality is that you’re a business owner, not a CIO. You might see words like “latency” and “backups” and scratch your head. What you DO understand is how to run a business, and a vCIO can act as the translation layer to help you understand how technology supports the other goals of the business, like customer retention and operational overhead.
With a vCIO on the job, you’ll be able to make more nuanced connections between technology and the way your business runs, thereby allowing you to make better decisions moving forward.
Your IT procurement shouldn’t be a reaction to a crisis; it should be fueled by your vision and where you want to take your business in the next five years. Working with a vCIO like First Column IT can align your infrastructure with these goals and help your technology make the jump from cost center to competitive engine. To get started today, give us a call at (571) 470-5594.
