IT Infrastructure: What you need now may not be what you need then!
You plan on growing and all indicators seem to agree with your plans. You have a stable IT infrastructure in place, but how can you ensure that it will grow with you, or in fact shrink if you need it to.
No one can predict the future so I cannot tell you that everything will be alright, but what you can do is build processes that are robust enough to scale up or down. IT infrastructure is an ever changing and evolving beast so will never sit still anyway. So planning for change is your best bet.
What you can do is plan how things will grow and to some extent why. If you know the reasons why you want to grow to the size you plan, that allows you to think about what you will need to enable the why. This approach also gives you the ability to par down your IT operational needs to the bare essentials. Implement what you need to answer the why, not what people tell you should have.
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No IT system is full proof and perfect. The main reason for this is because you will have people using it, they are not rational, logical robots who will do the right thing every single time. Therefore you always need to consider who is going to use your systems and why. There it is again… the WHY!
If you answer why you want people to use the systems in the way you have set them up, you already have the communication plan. Most people start with the why, that is what will give them the incentive to ‘log -in’. The how comes through using it and learning. There is ongoing discussion about what hardware and software should be used for different areas of the business and whether you supply devices or allow people to bring their own. Then there is security and privacy, data protection. The list goes on and all these need to be answered for your business. But if you are overwhelmed about where to start, you need to answer the why.
And remember that the why needs to have a good answer, you can’t just do something because you want to or you think it is the best or least of all, because it gives you the best and most colourful dashboards. The super users are most often your mid-tier managers, followed by your people on the ‘shop floor’. Your executives are most occasional users.
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By Ghilaine Chan. Do you have a question or would like to know more? Contact us on 020 3601 8475 or info@bmim.co.uk
