According to industry analysts, the uptick of digitization is expected to grow digital revenue from 16 percent to 37 percent. If you’re not already up to your ears in transformation projects, digital transformation is definitely in your future.
It isn’t just changing our lives in profound ways; digitization is creating new business models and upending traditional ones. From banks to healthcare to retail to the way we file our taxes, digital engagement has become so pronounced, it’s changed the face of how we live, work, and play. In enterprise IT, it’s bringing together business and technology stakeholders within to exploit the benefits and create new business frontiers.
The biggest issue that I see happening now is starting on the wrong fundamentals in your digital transformation journey. In my conversations with clients, far too many organizations are wasting budgets and resources on their IT assets by dancing to the tune of the manufacturers: dutifully re-upping maintenance contracts with their manufacturer vendors, replacing end-of-life devices that are still working well and having the complexity of managing multiple manufacturers, SLAs, and services.
Teams are leaner than ever. It’s become unwieldy with sizable IT assets across multiple classes of networking, server, and storage equipment distributed across multiple geographies, remote offices, and time zones.
Enterprise IT has not gotten simpler through the years. Agility has not been a friend of large organizations where legacy platforms, migrations, mergers, and acquisitions have made an alphabet soup of your data centers and global network. Today you are tasked with delivering your workforce with the freedom to work anywhere with mobility solutions and virtual desktops. Tomorrow, you need to deliver a business intelligence POC to a business unit who wanted it yesterday. As business priorities change or management directives change or business process bites, you find yourself in a pattern of stop, start, hold, cancel or do over again. How often does a project deliver on time or ahead of schedule?
How better IT asset management and recovery can help you with digital transformation
It’s now time for a shift. Digital transformation is an opportunity for you to take a look at what’s wrong and rip out traditional processes, and that includes your maintenance contracts.
Analytics, mobility, artificial intelligence, and augmented reality are engines of change for your business. At the heart of delivering it is the right IT infrastructure to support it. With cost pressures on CapEx spends, the right IT infrastructure is all about a cost-effective way to run your operations, protect your mission critical systems, and have the resilience to deliver the computing power you need. Changing your approach to how you source and maintain your IT assets is a simple lever with a big ripple effect.
Think about the following:
Your upgrade and maintenance strategy
An unbiased partner isn’t measuring its bottom line by the 3-year or 5-year cycles they can get from you to refresh equipment or sign more maintenance contracts. Third parties provide an impartial and holistic view of your diverse technology stack. When you’re creating a consolidated strategy to address the timing of various upgrades. This approach not only provides you with more flexibility to prioritize your investments, but also gives you a more unified view of what you have – so you know exactly what needs to be purchased, upgraded, extended, or repurposed on the road to digitization. Remember: amidst complexity, choose simplicity.
Get maximum value for your old or surplus inventory
Clear your used (or unused) inventory. Not only do you make your environment more sustainable (and healthier for employees), you may maximize the value gained from recovering your assets.
Channel your budget toward innovation
Your core infrastructure is well-supported and humming along to the tune of efficiency. When you don’t buy equipment you don’t need, those funds can be redirected toward innovation.
