How IT Support Can Improve Your Business Operations

IT is sometimes viewed as a business expense – a cost paid grudgingly so your computers keep working.

In this article, we’ll put forward a very different view. IT is a force multiplier that can dramatically improve all areas of your business, especially operations. To do that, though, you need people – in-house staff or a managed service provider (MSP) like us – who can help realise its potential.

Exactly how that potential is realised will vary between businesses. So, instead of getting into the technical weeds, we’ll cover the top-level benefits of IT for operations and some of the fundamental strategies your IT support staff can use to deliver them.

Efficiency

IT exists as a business function for one basic reason: computers improve efficiency astronomically. For most modern organisations, trying to operate without them would be almost impossible.

But, like all technologies, computing systems are only as good as the people who build and maintain them. A dysfunctional, badly run environment will hamstring your operational efficiency. At the same time, a better-than-average environment can be a competitive advantage – your people can do more and deliver better outcomes with fewer resources.

To achieve that advantage, though, you need at least 2 classes of IT resources. Think of the first as ‘maintainers’. These are the people and technologies that keep your environment running at a functional baseline.

It’s worth noting that maintaining existing IT systems is far from simple. Your maintainers are in a constant battle against entropy – software becoming deprecated, organisation requirements evolving, technical debt piling up, cybersecurity adversaries becoming more advanced. It’s one reason why so many businesses have dysfunctional IT environments. Those environments might have been set up properly, but, over time, their maintainers haven’t been given enough resources to fully combat entropy.

The second class of IT resources are ‘optimisers’. These are the people and technologies who actively improve your systems beyond the baseline. That can include making incremental, 1% gains in efficiency, as well as driving larger-scale transformations with outsized benefits (like migrating from a fully on-premises environment to a hybrid cloud). If maintainers keep you in the game, optimisers help you win.

It’s tempting to think of optimisers as a want, not a need. At a certain point, though, the line between optimisation and maintenance blurs. If all your competitors are running in highly efficient cloud environments, for example, simply maintaining an older on-prem environment isn’t enough. You need to evolve to just stay competitive – and your optimisers will drive that change.

In sum: as a function, IT can clearly deliver massive efficiency benefits. But, to realise those benefits, you need the right mix of support (maintainers and optimisers). For most small businesses, that means either fully outsourcing their IT to an MSP (which has the capabilities to deliver both maintenance and optimisation) or having an in-house systems administrator who can coordinate with that MSP.

Security and Compliance

Every organisation wants to be more efficient, but there are plenty that survive despite systemic inefficiency (at least, until market shifts and/or superior competitors wipe them out).

Good security and compliance are a little different. One serious compliance failure can lead to heavy fines and even criminal penalties for directors. One serious security breach can freeze your operations and wipe out your brand reputation overnight. And, because most businesses now operate digitally due to the efficiency benefits we just discussed, maintaining security and compliance typically falls to your IT support staff.

The easiest way to think about IT’s role in those 2 functions is the CIA triad: confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

1. Is your organisation’s data confidential? Exactly what that means depends on your data security requirements. The basic idea is that only the people who need access to given data should have it.
2. Is your data integrous? It should be intact (nothing missing or lost) and free from tampering.
3. Is your data available when your people need it?

The CIA triad is designed for IT security and compliance, but it overlaps with business resilience. (It can also seem to run counter to better efficiency, which is why efficiency-focused business operators sometimes neglect security and compliance – forgetting that regulator action or a cyberattack will be far more damaging to their operations than the cost of a decent firewall.)

Your IT support team will typically meet those 3 CIA requirements by implementing a framework like Essential Eight. That, in turn, will help keep your operations running smoothly – even if, for example, an adversary launches a ransomware attack or a natural disaster takes your hot servers offline.

Scalability

How do you scale your operations? For many organisations, that’s a genuinely complex question. Normally, you need:

1. a clear, well-defined strategy
2. the right staff
3. an easily replicable solution with viable unit economics
4. sites where solution production and delivery can physically take place
5. systems that aren’t constrained by increases in size or complexity.
6. Your IT support team can help deliver on points 4 and 5 (sites and systems).

Think about pre-cloud operational environments. To scale, you typically needed to acquire additional office space or satellite locations. Each new phase of growth meant financial hurdles that made scaling difficult.

Today, cloud computing has substantially reduced site-related barriers. With proper systems in place, knowledge workers can operate from almost anywhere in the world. Remote work is enabled by everything from accessing files via SharePoint to more complex technologies like cloud telephony and cloud PCs. Even if you still need staff at specific physical locations – think manufacturing facilities or construction sites – the cloud means your IT equipment costs are significantly lower.

The operative phrase, though, is ‘with proper systems in place’. You can’t solve site-related barriers to scale unless your IT systems are properly configured. A ‘lift-and-shift’ migration, for example, might move your IT environment into the cloud – but at a price point that nullifies any benefits.

Your IT systems can also have a big role in scaling your operations generally. Automation, data-led decision-making, decentralised control – each one is made possible with your IT team’s support. It’s also worth mentioning the less exciting (but equally important) aspects: removing chokepoints and optimising processes. That could include everything from consolidating your software stack under Microsoft 365 to capacity-planning your cloud resources.

Resilience

Resilience is an organisation’s ‘capacity to absorb stress, recovers critical functionality, and thrives in altered circumstances’. Normally, that refers to disaster preparedness – how well you navigate and recover from adverse events.

We’ve already talked about how most businesses operate and store data in some kind of computing environment. That means IT is a key part of resilience planning. There are four main ways you can build your IT resilience:

1. Back up your data. Regular backups following the 3-2-1-0 rule mean you can quickly return to full operationality if something goes wrong.
2. Have redundancies for critical hardware and software. If something is a single point of failure, it should always have a failover mechanism.
3. Put a disaster recovery plan in place. We covered how you can build one in this article.
4. Have a disaster recovery site. If you lose access to your primary environment, being able to quickly shift critical operations to a separate, fully equipped site can help minimise fallout.

Implemented correctly, each of those four steps will help your operations recover quickly if something does go wrong.

Summary

By now, it should be clear that IT is a critical business function, both in its own right and as a force multiplier for other functions (like operations). Efficiency, security, compliance, scalability, resilience – a well-resourced IT team can help you improve each one.

If you’re ready to start enhancing your IT, the first step is to source the right people. For most small businesses, that means an MSP. (Finding an experienced in-house staff member at a viable cost is incredibly difficult.) As you scale, a small, generalist in-house team combined with an MSP that specialises in areas like cloud computing and cybersecurity is often the best option.

We’ve helped more than 500 business across Australia build better operations through IT. To find out what that could look like for you, schedule a consultation with us.