Just as a house needs a strong foundation, so too does your IT strategy. The foundation? Your Technology Plan. The technology you have in play to support your business today may not scale to support your potential growth. By formulating a technology plan, and reviewing it regularly you can ensure your technology stack can support future growth.

Not only that, but it can also help you have a long-term strategy in place, without forcing sub-optimal systems to work beyond capacity.

Here’s three steps designed to ensure your technology plan is fit-for-purpose and is creating a strong foundation:

Plan for innovation

Technology that’s relevant today may not be tomorrow. And a band-aid today can only work for so long; aim to evolve. So, it’s essential to assess and build a solid technology stack that supports your current and future objectives.

• Is it time to automate warehousing or streamline administration and compliance?
• What do you need to be competitive now? How does technology deliver services to your customers?
• What will future growth look like?
• What will be relevant?
• What business problems do you want to solve? Is IT a barrier to advancement?

Building a strong foundation

Once you have clearly articulated objectives, consider what technology foundations you need to achieve those goals. It helps to understand whether the baseline of your technology stack can simply be expanded. Or if a new approach is better.

The right foundations lead to a more supportable platform, even through the most extreme growth. Simply throwing more resources at pre-existing tech is rarely the correct solution.

Take a 360^o outlook to your technology plan

Defining your technology mix isn’t only about hardware and software. It’s also implementing and supporting these systems throughout their lifecycle.

Both hardware and software must be maintained by experts to ensure reliability and under a management structure that gives you peace of mind.

Do you have the right equipment and solutions in place, and are they up to date or obsolete?

Consider the usable life and equipment’s warranty status of equipment, including server hardware and network hardware. If it fails tomorrow, what’s the impact on your productivity and profit?

A good asset warranty and support structure minimises downtime and even leads to early detection of pending failure.

Leverage technology and IT service partnerships

Do you have the internal resources and in-house experts you need? Can your internal IT team manage independently or do they need support?

This is where Managed Service Providers can enter the picture, providing full or co-managed service and support. Helping you fill a skill or expertise gap that is essential for your business success.

Managed IT service providers like FUJIFILM CodeBlue partner with clients to define and research a fit-for-purpose technology stack, leveraging our global reach and expertise.

IT and technology resources and support

It’s important to not only consider the technology but the IT support and expertise you may require from implementation to maintenance and ongoing service and support.

Do you have the internal resources and in-house experts you need to research and plan out the how, where and when of your Technology Plan? Not all companies have their own internal IT team.

IT managers can work with your managed service provider, if needed, to plan out technology implementation that suits your budget and provides IT services that work in the background with no fuss. A good MSP will deliver and support systems as part of your technology plan, scaffolded by service levels that give you peace of mind.

Use your living, dynamic technology plan

Technology plans should be reviewed annually to evaluate effectiveness and consider business changes over the previous period into the next. It’s not meant to be a static document.

If you don’t have the internal know-how, come and chat to us about implementing a strong Technology Plan that works for you.