5 Reasons to Have an Outside Vendor Provide an IT Roadmap
Many organizations find incremental value in having an outside vendor come into their organization to provide an IT Assessment. While it has the ability to be a painful internal exercise, it also can give you a real-life reality check on the state of affairs with your business IT.
Trapp Technology’s nine box framework which starts with an assessment of the business, its strategy, and the current state of IT. The assessment then evolves into a long-term strategy and set of recommendations to help organizations realize the full potential of their business technology.
But why rely on an outside vendor? Can’t you audit your technology on your own? While you certainly can, there are many reasons why a self-led assessment may not get to the root cause of your IT challenges.
1. Avoid Unintended Bias
With an outside vendor, you eliminate the potential for bias. Our clients benefit from our “solution agnostic” perspective. Our allegiance isn’t with any major hardware or software vendors — it’s with our clients.
A successful assessment presents all available solutions and provides you with a recommendation that makes the most sense for your business. Through 1-on-1 interviews with your staff, we’ll be able to cut through any internal biases regarding your internal IT. Additionally, a full-scale internal IT service satisfaction survey will be deployed across the business allowing you to get the “truth” about the current value perceived by your internal users.
2. Unmatched Expertise
When making the investment in an IT assessment, you need to ensure that the evaluation is accurate. When performing the assessment using internal resources, you can’t know what you don’t know — if the scope of the project is beyond your internal IT team’s capability, you’re putting yourself at risk for an inaccurate assessment. Our team of experts all holds 20+ years of high-level IT executive experience, having held high ranking IT positions at some of the most recognizable names in the business. They’ve built IT roadmaps for blue chip companies, expertly navigating internal politics and identifying how to maximize the value IT can bring to a business, regardless of their industry or size.
3. Objective Risk Identification
Have you ever looked for your cell phone while holding it in your hand? Often times, businesses perform security risk assessments, but lack the ability to identify risks simply because they don’t know where to look. While many vendors provide security and compliance readiness assessments separately from a full IT assessment, we provide this as a standard part of our IT assessments.
With all eyes on heightened IT security thanks to viruses like WannaCry and Petya, protecting your internal intellectual property as well as your client’s information has to be a top priority. We leverage internal and external penetration tests as well as industry-leading security scanning software to identify the risks and vulnerabilities in your network and infrastructure. When it comes to compliance testing, using an outside party is beneficial in order to best identify gaps and provide a remediation strategy. It’s all about being able to see the forest from the trees.
4. Informed Financial Forecasting
What’s my total cost of ownership? What are my shadow IT expenditures and what is my lost opportunity cost because technology is not delivering capabilities for the business? Where do I stand against my competition for spend benchmark as well as the value of IT? Lastly, where are there opportunities for cost savings and where can I re-direct spend to IT to earn greater ROI?
These are just a few of the questions we answer for all clients in our all-encompassing IT Financials and Benchmarks review. The old adage is true: cutting costs on a project could end up costing you more in the long run. Rather than pinch pennies by using internal resources to outline budgets, using a professional team could turn out to save you thousands in what would have been unexpected costs.
5. Strategic Business Alignment
Using an outside team to provide your IT assessment has the added benefit of essentially extending your internal IT department. After an assessment is performed, our IT experts will know your business from the inside out, giving you an army of technology strategists at your fingertips. After we sit extensively with the executive team to understand their strategy and vision, our team of experts is able to establish a strategy that will help to extend the goals and execute the overall strategy of the organization.
Whether you decide an internal assessment is enough, or you want an external team to focus on identifying gaps and risks in your organization and IT, it’s no secret that an assessment can bring a new perspective to increasing operating efficiency.
To start the conversation on how Trapp Technology can help you best, please fill out the form here.