Does your Business Appreciate the Value of IT?

A Modern IT Morality Tale: Not Knowing the Value of IT

At a time when business budgets are being continually constricted, there is more pressure than ever to demonstrate the business value of technology, particularly when all too often we’re confronted with the widely held view that, ‘IT costs too much’ to which sometimes the question, ‘costs too much compared to what?’ is stimulated.

Demonstrating the Business Value of IT

What’s often overlooked is that IT is critical to so many business accomplishments, and yet it is widely perceived as having minimal value, whilst investment in it is all too often resented by companies.

Any notion of value is absent, instead it is merely a cost, and a cost that for many businesses, must be minimised. Unless IT can prove it is providing cost-effective and relevant business support for its business, it will lose the backing of various lines of business and become inapt.

Comfort Rituals amongst Default IT Managers

Interestingly the comment about the cost is often made by business owners who have in many instances become the default IT Manager. They will, for example, spend time manually backing up their systems every day or week and go to the trouble of taking a backup disk off-site. It becomes something of a comfort ritual imbued with the satisfaction that they are doing something worthy that protects and safeguards their business, and to some extent they are right.

Time is Money, and Managed Services Save You Time

Similarly, business owners that quibble over the cost of IT, without understanding the full value of it, are often the ones to dismiss any notion of the Cloud having any role to play in their business, on the grounds of it being too expensive or not secure enough.

What isn’t explained in this instance is that they could have an automatic, unattended, fully secure, off-site backup for around £10 per month. How does that £10 per month compare with the value of their time they currently spend carrying out frequent backups?

Unfortunately, this is very common. Business owners become too familiar with completing IT tasks themselves, costing them their own time and effort, time and effort that could be spent more effectively elsewhere. The value of which could be significantly higher to the price of paying a mere £10 per month for professional managed services.

This consideration becomes even more extreme, when you factor in the cost associated with adding additional admin people to the business, rather than looking at investing in IT Solutions. Such IT solutions can help to automate the often manually intended processes that such individuals are asked to carry out, which ultimately could cost your company tens of thousands of pounds in staff salaries.

Does your Business Value IT?

Ultimately, IT only has value if it has value to the business. Yet, without being able to properly determine the value of IT within your company, there is risk of it being bypassed.

And yet now, with virtualised IT resources, compartmentalising the efficiency and cost attributed to each department within the business has made the task of assessing the value of IT for companies that much harder. But perhaps by assessing the value of IT through the reduction in time, effort, and stress to your business, you begin to gain a better understanding.

For assistance in how managed services can be provided at minimal costs, saving your business valuable time and stress, contact our friendly team at Rio IT today or find out more about us here.