You invested in technology to support your business, spending time and money to acquire and implement it. What happens if that technology turns out to be a lemon… a high-priced item that’s ultimately a dud, or at the very least doesn’t mesh with your future plans?
This is often the result when tech is purchased to fix a short-term issue without a long-term strategy, and ultimately means that the purchaser loses money and productivity due to incompatibility issues. Alternatively, planning a strategic roadmap for your IT to follow helps ensure your investments actually advance your business’ future.
Reactive Purchasing Brings Consequences
Three significant drawbacks of reactive purchasing could easily affect your operations:
- Unexpected Obsolescence – When you’re rushing to buy technology at the last minute, you’re unlikely to pay as much attention as you should to details like end-of-life. This could easily lead to unnecessary replacements, costing you more.
- Compatibility Conundrums – Similarly, it is far easier to procure updated tech that doesn’t play nice with your other established tools than it would be if you had the time to review them all and ensure that they could integrate properly.
- Ballooning Budgets – When you’re spending on tech impulsively, you may find yourself needing to spend thousands of dollars unexpectedly, throwing your budget off course. Does your business have a few grand lying around for an occasion like this?
These consequences can be avoided by creating and following a roadmap.
How to Build an IT Roadmap
Fortunately, the roadmap-building process is relatively simple, requiring only three steps.
1. Assessment
First, you need to know what you’re working with. Identify what you currently have to work with, how well it performs, and how secure you are. This will tell you what you have, what you lack, and how well you’re currently operating. Doing so will give you the projects that need to take priority as you move forward.
2. Alignment
Once you know what projects you need to undergo, it’s time to identify how these projects will help you accomplish your greater goals. For instance, if you want to do more to enable remote and hybrid work, a cloud migration will likely be the best approach to achieve this objective. If you’re trying to stabilize costs, shifting to more as-a-Service options may be the move.
The key is to ensure nothing is done without reason and that everything helps push you toward your goals.
3. Allocation
Finally, once you know which projects you want and need to undertake, create timelines that make your IT spending more consistent by establishing set times for tasks like hardware refreshes and license renewals.
Don’t Buy Lemons When You Need Reliability
A roadmap is a simple and effective way to make your technology more effective, more economical, and more reliable. We’re here to help you put one together and keep you on track.
Reach out to us for help putting together an IT roadmap designed to match your business’ needs. Give us a call at (616) 828-5360 to get started.