Step 3: Define your Needs
Identifying your business needs and priorities is the third step in the planning process. Since you should already have strategic goals set and hopefully have done a business and IT analysis, your needs should be fairly laid out.
Based on your goals, desired results or outcomes, and foreseeable issues or problems along the way you can determine what your business needs may be. This will be a large factor in what your IT solutions should consist of.
Your needs may include:
- Adapting to new business changes or acquisitions
- Ability to accommodate expected business growth
- Solutions to enhance corporate productivity
- Needs for any policy changes
- Regulatory or compliance needs or changes
Once you know your business needs, you can begin to explore how to meet them.
Let’s look at expected business changes, acquisitions and growth goals for the year. These needs indicate that you will need your staff and systems to be fully functioning and agile for these changes. The key here is productivity. So what does it take to keep your staff up and running in order to do their jobs effectively? Let’s face it, most of us spend almost all of our time doing our jobs on a computer, tablet, or phone so the less downtime and issues there are when it comes to our technology, the more efficient we can be.
Productivity in IT closely aligns with the ability to reduce incidents by doing all the simple proactive tasks that need to be completed regularly. These simple things include monitoring all your systems and network components, regular maintenance of these devices, and on-going management of your IT environment. These tasks can decrease unforeseen incidents, keeping systems running and productivity high. The problem that most IT support teams experience is that their daily priorities are: 1. reactionary support of users and 2. the large corporate projects that are being pushed by the Executive team. Generally the Executive team does not understand what the proactive tasks are and/or why they are important. In turn, they don’t put a priority on these tasks which in the end reduce downtime. Once you have reduced your downtime it’s easier to react quickly to your users and have the time to work on the key corporate projects.
While defining your needs you will need to look closely at a lot of different items such as policy changes, regulatory and compliance needs as well as your productivity plan. Building a productivity plan into your overall planning process will hope you focus your attention to what is absolutely most important when it comes to IT. Conveniently the items that will drive productivity for users will also help you with your regulatory and compliance. This is the information that will get your Executive team on board with the items that are going to make the organization more productive. Specifically making the proactive tasks a high priority will enable great user support and successful projects.
So, now that you know what your needs are and you have an idea of what it means to meet them, you are ready for step 4, exploring solutions.
