Technology consultants and support experts are playing a growing role in the modern enterprise as more businesses are tasked with managing diverse solutions spread over a variety of locations. Personal mobile devices, analytics systems, public cloud apps and services, private clouds, app development platforms and the myriad other emerging technologies impacting today's businesses can be enough to leave IT leaders overwhelmed. The result is a situation in which many core IT competencies are emerging as major challenges.
Key challenges facing today's IT departments
With such varied and rapidly changing technologies impacting IT teams, organizations are facing difficulties with primary areas of operations, not just big-picture, strategic issues. For example, a study from the ISACA found that IT security, infrastructure management and dealing with emerging technologies/infrastructure changes were the top three challenges cited by respondents to a survey of IT auditing leaders. Core competencies such as resourcing, staffing and regulatory compliance were also listed among the major issues facing organizations.
These responses paint a sobering picture, but one that is very common – businesses have so many technologies to manage that many can't keep up with everyday support demands.
The widespread IT support problem
Improving IT service management and delivery isn't a new issue for technology professionals, but it is becoming a more acute requirement as businesses become more dependent on technology. A report from Info Security explained that, for a long time, IT support teams have been mired in an operational climate that is purely responsive in nature. In essence, businesses would deal with support challenges as they came up, devoting whatever resources they could to the problem and hoping they could come up with a solution before significant business disruption takes place.
The news source explained that companies need to move beyond this structure and become more responsive and adaptable as they work to improve IT support. This process involves improving core IT monitoring and management functionality so businesses gain visibility into end-user activities and can identify problems before they affect the business.
"The days of complex, slow IT support operations are fading."
Getting proactive about IT support
Implementing proactive support methodologies can seem overwhelming, but leading technology consultants and support experts already have systems in place to help. The issue here is simple – most businesses haven't been built with IT support as a core competency, and instead focus on their core products and services as they develop their staffing and process strategies. Conversely, technology consultants have built their operations around helping organizations manage and maintain excellent IT systems, giving them an edge because they have the pre-existing competencies and underlying systems needed to monitor IT operations effectively.
Leading IT support providers can:
- Offer desktop and server monitoring as a primary part of their services, giving them visibility into any issues that might arise as early as possible.
- Use increased IT transparency to act quickly when problems do arise, eliminating the need for complex, time-consuming support calls.
- Manage updates and patches for you in the background so your systems remain stable and up to date at all times.
- Perform robust inventory assessment processes to gain a full understanding of the systems in use within your business.
Taken together, these capabilities provide the awareness of the IT configuration needed to anticipate issues and identify when something does go wrong immediately. The days of complex, slow IT support operations are fading. The same advanced technologies that allow businesses to use robust data and application systems to anticipate market conditions and maximize resources can be applied to IT support. At MC Services, we pride ourselves on going beyond basic consulting and providing full IT support functionality for our clients, including the ability to make on-site visits as needed.
