4 Ways Strategic IT Planning can Help Your Small Business
Strategic IT planning is the roadmap to success your business has been waiting for — and it could be the key to unlocking even more business growth!
Your IT strategy will be the living, evolving document that shows your team, investors, and customers how you intend to implement new strategies and achieve the goals you’ve been working toward. It will outline exactly where your strengths and weaknesses are and highlight the areas in which IT can contribute. Through strategic IT planning, a company can gain a competitive advantage by planning ahead and making the best use of the tools and technology at their disposal.
But why do you need strategic IT planning for your small business? Because it can help you identify strengths, weaknesses, and risks, help you respond to change, better communicate your intentions, and limit potential incidents — and much more! Let’s dig into the details of how strategic IT planning can help your small business.
Identifies Your Strengths and Weaknesses
A truly thorough strategic IT plan begins with a comprehensive assessment of your current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and potential threats. In order to determine where you want your company to be, and how to get it there, you must first establish exactly where it is. And that means identifying all the internal and external factors that can affect your IT’s ability to contribute to your company’s growth and success.
By identifying the gap between where your current IT department is and what you hope to achieve, you’ll also be able to determine what barriers are in the way of your growth and what resources you’ll need to bridge that gap.
Strategic planning is designed to help you identify your small business’s strengths and weaknesses because it is through that analysis that you’ll be able to plan your roadmap forward. It will tell you what technology you already have in place and what you need to invest in to give you a competitive edge and help you meet your business goals.
Allows You to Respond to Change
When it comes to technology, the one thing you can always rely on is change. Updates, improvements, upgrades. The list is neverending as change lives constantly around the next corner. And as a business owner, you know that those who are prepared for change are the ones best equipped to leverage it into an advantage.
Thinking about the future, preparing for the changes that are coming to the best of your ability. That’s the only way to remain successful. And strategic planning encourages just that.
From the start of your IT planning, you’ll be looking at the comprehensive picture of where you are, where you want to be, and what is standing in your way to getting there. One of the most common barriers is change, and failing to plan for it. But with strategic planning, you are better prepared for unexpected changes. This living document will be filled with processes, policies, what-ifs, and procedures to cover you in the event of that unforeseen blackout just before the conference begins or the system outage right in the middle of a holiday weekend.
Helps Better Communicate Your Intentions
Whether you are attempting to communicate with your superiors, your employees, or your customers, you need a centralized message. You need to have answers to all the questions they’ll ask, and you need to know exactly what’s in it for each of them — the biggest question on everyone’s mind.
Strategic IT planning is the perfect way to craft a high-level roadmap to your success that you can share with your team, investors, and customers. Although your strategic plan is a living document that should be constantly changing and updating, the goals and outcomes you set shouldn’t change too drastically — unless you meet them, that is! So, this gives you targeted messaging and explicit information with which to communicate your intentions.
Additionally, it serves as a good reminder to you on what your intentions were. It’s common to get buried in the details of every day, especially as a business owner. Sometimes you need a reminder of where you are going just as much as your team or customers do. With strategic IT planning, it’s right there ready for you whenever you need it!
Limits Potential Incidents
Any business owner knows that an outage or any IT downtime can be detrimental to the success of your business. In order to meet your goals and continue growing and thriving, you have to be able to reach your documents, converse with customers, process orders, track your labor, etc. Even one small incident could mean the difference between continuing to grow or shutting your doors.
Planning ahead limits the chance of such incidents. With it, you’re able to spot the flaws in your systems and processes ahead of time. When you spot your weaknesses, you’re better able to plan for them. Or better yet, solve them before they even become an issue.
Help Grow Your Small Business with Strategic IT Planning from Net3 IT
You already know that having a stable IT structure in place is vastly important in today’s technology-driven world. This roadmap will give you a detailed view of exactly where your technology stands. It’ll also show what resources you still need and how to bridge the gap to achieve your goals.
Working together with a knowledgeable managed IT services agency like Net3 IT, strategic planning can help you ensure that your IT processes are functioning as one powerful, cohesive unit. When change comes, be it an outage or employee turnover, your strategy will already be in place. This will allow you to get back up and running with minimal downtime or disconnect.
So, what are you waiting for? Contact us today to start your strategic IT planning. Let us help you create the roadmap to success your small business needs. Don’t flounder when disaster strikes. We can help you with technology assessments, IT audits, disaster recovery, and much more. Let’s start planning for your business’s future together.