Is Your IT Department an Innovator or a Roadblock?

What role does the IT department play in your business? Does it contribute to strategic initiatives, or does it mostly provide day-to-day support for your users and systems?

Digital transformation is a requirement for businesses that wish to remain competitive, and the constant state of innovation is fundamentally transforming today’s enterprise network and data center infrastructures at a rapid pace. Consequently, IT today is very different from what it used to be a few years ago. IT must balance the following considerations on a daily basis:

As a business, the way that you connect and communicate both internally and with customers is key to your success. Providing a seamless user experience is often the first step to building the relationships that matter, which means that your business must be underpinned by a strong network that fosters the development of these connections.

What role does the IT department play in your business? Does it contribute to strategic initiatives, or does it mostly provide day-to-day support for your users and systems?

An automobile finance company has a Cisco contact center environment that services millions of customers. The internal IT staff has extensive experience in the manufacturing industry, but it remains hands-off with the company’s contact center and lacks the appropriate expertise to manage the Cisco environment.

Monitoring has proven to be one of the more difficult components of IT for many years, perhaps because we make too many assumptions about how monitoring works and what the monitoring tools we use can actually do. We’ve all been mesmerized by demos at trade shows that boldly claim to have finally “cracked the code”! Unfortunately, after we purchase the tool, take it home, and install it, we begin the long, winding road to disappointment when it doesn’t do what we thought it would do. Alas, the tool just showed well on the trade show floor.

Acquisitions can present a variety of challenges. When two companies have very different cultures, it can be difficult to bring them together in a way that satisfies employees from both original companies. Productivity can suffer when employees are stripped of the tools that help them do their jobs effectively.