Managed Services: Supercharge your In-house Team

Are you ahead of the curve or stuck on a treadmill with an in-house IT staff that’s doesn’t have the resources to keep pace with the rapid and multiple-technology changes sweeping the IT landscape? Based on disruptive technologies already in-place, our modes of selling, marketing, communicating, collaborating, innovating, training and educating won’t look the same in the next 5 to 10 years as today.

Many enterprise companies remain in denial, wanting to control everything. They cling to the notion they can manage their infrastructure architectures and IT project management needs without help from computer consultant firms and managed services. This was doable back in day of standard architectures and few choices from a handful of vendors.

Missed Opportunities

Today, the migration to mobile services, cloud computing and virtualization make integrating these new technologies into legacy systems major challenges for in-house IT teams without computer consultant help and managed services.

Consider a likely scenario taking place in many enterprise companies today.

The marketing and sales teams see a humongous opportunity to grow the revenue stream, which requires a mobile or big data solution. The missed-opportunity costs of trying to reinvent the wheel with in-house IT teams that have little expertise in these new technologies can be staggering.

Managed Services and Solutions

Many new technologies are already commodities provided by computer consultants, or provided as completely managed services, such as big data as a service. Competent IT professional services providers have computer consultants on staff with years of experience to start new projects immediately. In contrast, doing the same project in-house could take months to hire the and train the people, and give them the needed IT project management support to make it happen.

Furthermore, staffing up to develop a new technology is a crap shoot. When new employees fail to meet your expectations, the failure can be quite expensive. Computer consultant help, in comparison, comes without the costs and headaches of hiring new staff that don’t work out.

Control Your Costs

Outsourcing all or a portion of your new IT project needs to computer consultant firms not only truncates the time before you go live with new IT projects, you can also save a bundle on your investment in new IT technologies. A 2011 CompTIA Trends in Managed Services survey revealed that 46 percent of the surveyed companies cut their annual IT expenses by at least 25 percent by partnering with managed services firms. Moreover, 13 percent achieved a 50 percent or more savings in IT expenses.

Outsource the Risks

Investing in new technologies carries inherent risks. Unless you’re parked on the cutting edge of new technologies, you never know what’s looming on the horizon. Newer technologies rapidly emerge to replace new technologies. Government regulations could negatively impact the deployment of new technologies. A company’s financial condition might change. Market demand could change. Change is the only certainty that’s bankable. Outsourcing the risks inherent in developing new technologies to computer consultant firms and managed services lets you focus on your core competencies.

Leading the Digital Charge

Gartner’s 2014 CIO global survey of 2,300 CIOs, “Taming the Digital Dragon,” examined the “third era” of enterprise IT. We’re now in the third era where the old paradigm that linked enterprise IT to the efficiency and effectiveness of internal processes as markers of business success no longer applies. In the new paradigm – the third era – enterprise IT drives business success by enabling disruptive new products, services and business models. As digitalization rapidly increases, the winners and losers across all industries are being determined by the ability of CIOs to bridge the gap between the second and third eras.

CIOs who are successfully bridging the gap usually have two basic priorities:

  1. Renovating the core IT infrastructure for the digital future
  2. Exploiting new technologies

Renovating core IT infrastructures requires fully exploiting the potential of private and public cloud computing for mobile and contextualized solutions, exploiting big data and outsourcing IT innovation to more experienced and nimble computer consultants and managed services.

CIOs wanting to be control freaks is a major encumbrance that’s preventing many enterprise companies from bridging the gap between the second and third eras. This is dangerous. It severely obstructs speed to market, with lagging companies taking the hit for being a day late and a dime short.

The good news is the Gartner 2015 CIO global survey found that 73 percent of the CIO’s surveyed say they’ve changed their leadership style over the past three years. Moreover, 75 percent of the CIOs agree they must change over the next three years from being control freaks to vision freaks.

Becoming a vision freak demands that CIOs delegate many IT projects to computer consultants and managed services to spend more time engaging customers, senior line leadership and the board.