One of the main reasons many businesses change IT providers is because they want an upgrade to the service delivery experience.
This comes in many forms, and all IT providers are different in how they’ll give you a better experience than your current IT provider.
A key piece of this upgraded experience, and something that usually is not advertised or quoted as part of an IT service provider’s service, is how they are going to get you from point A in your business’s technology maturity to point B.
Continual improvement is the name of the game and comes in different forms—it is all about the experience you receive from the service delivery.
One of the main items to focus on when it comes to your business’s technology maturity and continual improvement is a quarterly account review. These come as standard, but what may not be standard is the technology roadmap.
Working and focusing on a technology roadmap at the start of a new partnership and at these quarterly meetings can have a big impact over time on the running of your business and its technology maturity.
The question you might have now is what exactly is a technology roadmap and how do we build one for our business?
The roadmap is basically a fancy way of prioritizing what needs to be done in your business to raise the technology maturity of your business.
This maturity will help drive efficiencies and could lead to digital transformative opportunities for the company.
The checklist will have items that are easy and quick to deliver with minimal effort. It will also have items that are quick to deliver but will require no effort, as well as other items that will take time and resources and drive significant changes. Finally, there will be items that will take time and resources but will drive minimal change.
How we prioritize all these items is by using a matrix diagram (see Figure 1).
The new IT provider will be able to identify technology opportunities, and I’m sure you’ll also have a list of your own tech improvements you’d like to see in the business—using the matrix, you’ll be able to identify exactly what tasks to prioritize first and what tasks form longer-term projects that can be part of the quarterly account reviews.
Here’s our example list that both the new IT provider has prescribed as part of an audit and the business’s own list of tech improvements and quick wins:
– Faster internet in the office (will require a new internet line and the installation of a new network switch and access points)
– More secure IT so we don’t get as many phishing emails (Deployment of an email phishing solution to complement default M365 protection)
– Better onboarding experience for new staff (IT onboarding form and new process development with HR for rapid deployment of devices to new staff)
– More secure IT environment to meet new compliance standards (Azure join all devices and enrollment of Intune, application of conditional access policies)
– Digitalization of manual over-the-phone applications (Build of new online forms with the sales team)
– Fewer IT problems (Identify issues in the business that can be permanently fixed without the need for a temporary band-aid)
– Upgrade of laptops to Windows 11 (Audit of hardware estate and device upgrade/purchase where required)
– Files better organized (decommission file server and migrate all files to SharePoint aligning to departmental structure)
As you can see from the priority matrix we can easily understand what tasks we can complete first, these are our quick wins – take minimal effort and drive some big changes in our current IT infrastructure.
The top right quadrant are bigger projects that will deliver value and the bottom right are tasks that would come down further on the priority list as there’s effort involved and not a lot of value for the business in return – certainly with Windows 11 it might be a great product but it’s not going to massively change the way you work currently if you have a modern PC.
If you want further information on how we can help deliver a technology roadmap for your business please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
