Achieving a competitive advantage can depend on a variety of factors. Innovation, flexibility, strong leadership and a healthy company culture are all integral to a business’s ability to develop sustainable competitive advantages. However, additional resources often lie dormant within a company’s organizational structure that, once tapped, can become powerful catalysts for competitive gains.
One of these powerhouses is your IT department.
How a business implements and uses technology can be major factors for success. Productivity and efficiency all hinge on a company’s ability to harness and use technology.
Following are 4 ways that IT systems can contribute to your business’s competitive advantage:
- Provide Nimble Technology Systems that Easily Grow and Change with Your Business
Small businesses often must react to changing market conditions. With IT systems in place that can adapt quickly to change, your technology can grow as your business grows. Today you’re struggling to keep pace with exponential growth and demand, and next week you’re looking for tenants to sublease your space as the competition unexpectedly shifted and business slowed to a crawl. Whether you’re expanding, consolidating or morphing into something entirely different, scalable and flexible systems will give you exactly what you need to succeed.
By partnering with a managed IT service provider, companies can assess which systems can provide the appropriate range of capabilities to complement all of their potential needs – next week and next year.
- Consolidate Costs and Calls
Most small-to-midsized businesses manage relationships with a vast number of vendors. From office supplies to catering to technology providers, each vendor relationship has its own quirks, and often requires a delicate combination of personal banter, polite requests, nagging, and demands to achieve the desired results.
IT vendors in particular can present a challenge as any one company or product may be comprised of several other related businesses. Any one request can be passed along a long line of vendors, one to the next, as your phone call is placed on hold after hold and your company’s system remains non-operational.
Managed IT service providers take on this burden for your staff. Rather than contact a vendor directly, you simply place a call to your individual representative or your provider’s help desk, and they take ownership of the issue and deal directly with your vendors. They can also offer you a workaround to keep your systems up and running while you wait for a resolution.
Additionally, consolidating services and calls to a single provider offers the added benefit of a single invoice every month. Most managed IT service providers operate on a standard monthly fee subscription, which enables simple, predictive IT budgeting.
- Become a Technology Trend Setter
Are you working in the cloud, or just feel like your head is in the clouds? Is virtualization on your agenda? Is your network optimized? What does all of that even mean?
Just when you adopt one new technology, it seems as though another faster, more advanced development arrives on the scene. Technology isn’t going to slow down anytime soon – if ever – and you want to be sure your business can keep up.
MSPs provide a staff of industry experts that stay up to date on all the changes in the technology marketplace. They can help you determine what services your business needs, how to integrate them with your existing and future solutions, and how to make all of it work for you and your staff and customers.
- Focus on Your Business, Not Your Technology
Forget everything we just said. Unless your company is a technology solutions provider, you shouldn’t be focused on IT. You have bigger fish to fry.
By offloading your company’s IT management to a managed services partner, you become free to focus on your core business functions – with less downtime and fewer tech-related interruptions.