With most businesses looking to slam their foot on the pedal of digital transformation in the short to medium term, ensuring you have access to the right skills, experience, insight, and industry benchmarks can be the difference between triumph and tragedy. Internal resources may have the knowledge and experience to support your current IT systems, but how much capacity will they have to support innovation? That’s why many turn to the impartial insight and experience of a technology consultancy partnership to offer realistic solutions to update and modernise their existing IT infrastructure.
Advantages of using external consultants
There’s no denying it, the pace of technology transformation and evolution isn’t going to slow down, and businesses need to find a way to keep pace and embrace changing technology usage. This is where the advantages of technology and IT consultancies lie, as they have deep insight into the intersection between what your organisation needs from its IT systems now, what it will need in the future, and what you can realistically achieve with a transformation project given your wider business objectives.
Whether you’re considering new Cloud architecture, going AWS serverless, updating your security, or advancing your journey into Agile, there are several things you need to consider: what internal resources you have, your budget, the wider context and the impact on other projects and your organisation in the short, medium, and long term. This can be a daunting prospect, and all the while the cost of delay is mounting, and your technology is becoming more and more outdated… In the face of all this decision making, this is the optimal time to reach out to a technology consultancy for guidance and impartial advice.
There are a few other signs that your transformation projects would benefit from engaging a tech or IT consultancy that you should be aware of so you can ensure the most efficient transformation possible.
6 tell-tale signs you need a technology consultancy
1. Your in-house team would benefit from additional specialist insight
Every organisation is different and will have different internal IT resources. Some will have large teams or IT professionals with varied backgrounds, knowledge, and experience, and some may be operating with smaller IT functions.
Between these two opposite ends of the spectrum can lie a vacuum of wider business understanding and the ability to trace what the business needs from its IT systems and processes both now and in the future. IT consultancies are able to place your IT and technology requirements within the larger context of all your business functions and even further afield by benchmarking them within the wider industry. This allows your digital transformation projects to keep pace with your competitors.
2. Your in-house resources don’t have the capacity to take on large-scale change
Relevant to the point above, most IT teams are very busy with their business-as-usual activities and may struggle to find additional bandwidth to take on the strategy, planning and implementation of a digital transformation project too.
3. You need an impartial perspective
Your IT infrastructure, systems and processes are purpose built for your organisation and may be quite complex if accommodating many operational requirements, departments, teams or even additional offices. This can mean there’s quite a dense Gordian knot to unpick before you can start making suggestions for improvement. Even then, it may be difficult to view your systems objectively, pinpoint problems free of office politics or agree on solutions to fix it with stakeholders.
Consultancies’ teams of associates can step in and view the entire ecosystem with fresh, impartial eyes. They can appraise the situation in line with your current business requirements and take a more holistic view when suggesting solutions and strategies for improvement.
4. You are experiencing an IT crisis
Some of the leading tech organisations in the world go through a crisis or two. In March 2021, Microsoft suffered a security breach that impacted 250,000 people and 30,000 global organisations when its on-site servers suffered four zero-day exploits. Attackers managed to gain access to user login credentials and got admin privileges on the affected servers.
Needless to say, safety requires an accurate and timely IT ecosystem health check. Effective IT consultancies can step in, assess the situation, and start implementing a solution to mitigate and damage the crisis might have caused. Deploying knowledgeable teams of associates to provide onsite support in the short term and long-term strategic support too.
5. You do not have the budget to recruit the skills and insights you need
Engaging an IT consultancy to oversee a digital transformation project is a more cost-effective way to resource the project as you only need to pay for the skills and resources you need for the length of the contract. You gain access to the high-level experience and insights you need to set up your project, and get the required amount of knowledge transfer to maintain the systems or software after the contract is completed.
When you compare this against the ongoing costs of hiring a high-level IT and technology professional permanently, pension, tax, holiday and sick leave, salary, etc. paying for a consultancy for a set amount of time can have a hugely beneficial impact on your yearly revenue and profitability as a capital expenditure (CAPEX) rather than an operating expenditure (OPEX).
6. You are implementing a new system, process, or software
If your in-house team has the capacity to put in the time and the research to take the lead on your digital transformation project, they may not have a full view of what implementation can look like beyond their own technical requirements.
Implementing a new system is more than just setting it up and switching it on, there’s data transfers to take care of, security to set up, teaching the whole organisation how to use the new system correctly, being a vocal advocate of the change and communicating the benefits for company-wide buy in and much more.
Do you recognise any of these scenarios? Then let’s talk!
Our mission is simple, to help our customers accelerate their digital journey and achieve their business goals.
We operate through a three-stage process of Consult > Build > Run so that wherever you are on your IT roadmap, we’ll support you in developing strategies and solutions that achieve your business goals. We have extensive experience of providing board level support, optimising suppliers, leveraging offshore capability to hands on complex program recovery and service transformation and stability.
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