In today’s technology-driven world, organizations need an ironclad IT strategy to ensure that IT infrastructure enables, rather than inhibits, business growth. Companies that suffer from inefficiencies in IT architecture or misalignment between IT and business strategies can quickly fall behind their competitors. Likewise, effective IT governance is crucial to an organization’s success by enhancing the efficiency and profitability of business operations.
AppliedTrust’s Strategy and Governance services can help you successfully develop and execute an enterprise-wide IT strategy that supports your business objectives, as well as clarify and strengthen fundamental IT governance processes in order to maximize results and ongoing success.
IT Strategy
Understanding how IT can best meet the needs of the business is important when determining critical issues such as budget and priorities. But sometimes IT’s tasks and role can be confusing at best. AppliedTrust will work with your organization to create an IT Strategy Map that identifies the goals of IT and how these relate to the rest of the business. The Map will identify and prioritize goals and tasks, and will include resource estimates and an implementation schedule. These goals are laid out according to functional areas that apply specifically to the business at hand. For example, some organizations will need to include a standards compliance perspective and some will not. Other organizations might need to dedicate a portion of the map to securing an application developed in-house while organizations that do no software development will not.
In many organizations, the IT Strategy Map serves as a cornerstone for choosing and prioritizing IT efforts spanning multiple years. This powerful tool can be used as a means to communicate these efforts to stakeholders throughout the business. Once buy-in has been achieved across the business, IT has the ability to clearly articulate its accomplishments in a way that can be understood throughout the organization. IT’s progress can also be tracked against the Map, again building alignment with IT and the rest of the company.
IT Governance
Ensuring that an organization’s IT function is effective requires more than merely understanding the technology layer. Many IT groups struggle with the organizational and management aspects of their operations, including:
- IT management structure.
- Relationship to and communication with other business units.
- Staff accountability.
- Cost and schedule management.
- Process standardization and repeatability.
One thing that makes AppliedTrust unique in the IT services industry is that in addition to deep technical proficiency, we also have world-class expertise in IT organizational management. We can apply this combination of skills to provide strong leadership in helping you modernize and transform your IT organization. Such a transformation typically involves:
- Migrating toward industry best practices for IT governance.
- Developing an efficient and effective technical architecture.
- Evaluating (and reengineering) existing governance processes and procedures.
- Deploying and supporting new technology.
- Eliminating cultural barriers so as to improve IT alignment with other business units.
- Assessing IT staff resource strengths and weaknesses.
- Establishing a service book and associated service-level metrics.
We can help your organization develop and execute an effective IT strategy and successfully navigate the intricacies of solid IT governance. Call us at (303) 245-4545 or contact us online.
