Clearing the way for your IT teams to make strategic change

Combatting surprise IT issues can take up to 90% of an average IT department’s day-to-day workload, meaning that long-term strategic tasks often go neglected.

In fact, resolving device downtime is now so prominent that it’s having a knock-on effect on the overall efficiency of IT departments, as well as incurring hidden costs for the wider company – with a lack of strategic direction resulting in opportunities for growth and innovation being lost altogether.

To avoid more losses, it’s increasingly clear that change is needed, and needed fast. That means clearing the way for your IT teams to get back to their priority tasks.

The shifting goalposts of a hybrid world

With critical emergencies so commonplace for IT teams, longer-term innovation often doesn’t get a chance to take priority. However, this isn’t the only problem that companies will have to consider - since being in a constant state of emergency could be taking its toll on IT professionals; something which the hybrid set-up has only exacerbated.

In order for your staff to be effective from home, elements such as equipment, cloud storage, and network access must all be functioning reliably – but if device rollouts have been hastily completed by busy IT colleagues, employees may be forced to travel to the office for hardware to be replaced. As well as creating downtime and cost for the business, frustrated colleagues may add even more stress to your IT staff’s already heaping plate.

To minimise the chances of burnout, businesses must put serious consideration into ways that they can lighten the physical and mental load for their IT teams.

The root of the problem

As with most issues, new technology is the answer to getting IT teams back on track – but without time and resources, integrating it properly will prove to be a significant challenge.

Therefore, before investing in solutions, businesses must first assess their current operations and identify where bottlenecks originate from. Perhaps employee devices are outdated and no longer fit for purpose; or perhaps your current IT infrastructure lacks up-to-date security provisions. Maybe an increase in outages is down to a lack of failover capabilities, meaning significant monetary losses on a monthly basis.

Whatever your issue might be, IT teams simply do not have to the time for new equipment setups – let alone entire infrastructure upheavals – so while replacing inefficient technology is definitely a priority, assessing where your internal processes can be streamlined is a key step to consider first.

Creating room to breathe

Luckily, solutions are available that can make all the difference for your IT teams. Seeking out guidance from external experts is a great first step – since not only can they pinpoint problem areas and recommend ways to streamline your processes; but they can also handle equipment rollouts without requiring any resource from your IT department.

Furthermore, with this kind of expertise, setup time can be reduced down to mere hours – with ongoing support of your new devices handled, meaning your IT department can return their focus to the tasks that matter.

Another area to consider is how many servers you are currently running – since infrastructures can easily become over-complicated in order to cater to hybrid workforces. However, the right external experts can consolidate your servers down to a more manageable size whilst maintaining them in the background; taking more burden from your IT team.

Charting a course

The amount of focus that surprise technical issues take from IT departments is far too much to be sustainable; and leaving this unaddressed leads to staff burnout, slow innovation, and frustration when hybrid working. Streamlining processes and updating IT infrastructure is made much easier by collaborating with external specialists – and the right support gives your IT teams the freedom to create innovative and lasting change for your organisation.  

To provide an idea of what this might look like, some examples include:

• McCambridge Duffy's entire IT infrastructure is managed by Apogee, with a license-per-user arrangement allowing them to significantly cut costs by shrinking their remote servers down from thirteen to four. The firm have also selected Apogee as their digitisation partner, and utilise the Cloud to further streamline their operations.   

"We've been on a transformative journey over the last five or so years, and I don't think we could have reached this point today had we not cooperated so closely with the Apogee team," said Michael Rutherford of McCambridge Duffy. "Now virtually everything we touch is an Apogee solution."

•  Stonewall saved the equivalent of 65 working days by having their hybrid IT infrastructure supplied, imaged, setup, installed, and supported on their behalf by Apogee - with the disposal of legacy systems handled responsibly through the Buy Back IT scheme.

"If we tried to deploy 100-odd laptops pre our Apogee experience, it would have been an issue," said a spokesperson from Stonewall. "Apogee has definitely lightened the load and pressure on myself and our engineer regarding resource time."