Does your IT department perform re-actively to problems as they occur or are they proactive, attempting to head off problems before they occur? Sadly, many IT departments are reactive because they lack the proper IT organization strategies to use technology and apps to become proactive.
Taking a reactive approach is ineffective and affects productivity and the potential growth of your business. Your IT department is constantly running around putting out one “fire” after another, never really getting ahead.
Now that many businesses are having employees work from home, it is also a great time to develop new IT organization strategies and set about implementing them to transform your IT department from reactive to proactive.
Step 1: Create an outline for a detailed IT strategy.
The first step in developing effective IT strategies is to understand where you are now, and how you can make improvements to better manage your software, hardware, applications, IT infrastructure, and so on.
Initially, you just want an outline of key areas you want to focus on like server monitoring, integrating new technologies, and other such things that can benefit your business now and in the long term.
Step 2: Expand on your outline key focus topics.
The next step is to expand your outline. You will want to get your IT department involved for each of the bulleted points in your outline. Assign specific topics to specific teams to develop an action plan and what is needed to achieve the desired outcome.
Step 3: Document as you go.
Make sure everyone is documenting what they are doing and how they are doing it. That way, if something isn’t working out how you envisioned it, you can save time by reviewing what has been done and where things started to go wrong.
Step 4: Communicate the new IT strategies with all employees.
Changes in IT can have implications for all employees. Make sure you communicate vital information with your other departments early on to avoid issues down the road. Your employees may raise concerns that you or our IT department overlooked. Identifying and resolving these issues sooner, than later, is always a good idea.
Step 5: Review where you will be investing in your IT department.
Making changes to become proactive can take time. You want to carefully review where it is best to invest resources that will give you the most “bang for your buck.” For instance, to address concerns about network server outages, you would want to invest in server monitoring tools and apps. With the right types of network monitoring, you can be alerted to problems before they become major issues.
Step 6: Implement changes, review, adjust, and repeat.
You want to monitor any changes you make and whether they are providing the desired results. If not, make adjustments to your strategies and review them again. The thing to remember is effective IT organization strategies are constantly evolving and changing as your business grows and your business needs also change.
Step 7: Don’t try to do it all at once.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to roll out multiple IT strategies simultaneously. Doing so can make it hard to determine whether the strategy delivers the desired results. Instead, implement strategies one at a time. Going slow and steady will lead to more effective and consistent results and successful results.
By using these steps, you can gradually transform your IT department from being reactive to proactive. For access to the best server monitoring software solutions, including free, full-functioning 30-day trials, please feel free to contact Power Admin at 1-800-401-2339 to learn more about our server monitoring apps and how they can help make your IT department proactive.
