As business productivity continues to be driven by technology, it can be very difficult for IT departments to keep up with the needs of individual business units.
IT must juggle application deployments, Cloud migrations and management and all number of trouble tickets around existing company infrastructure. And they’re expected to do all of this on ever tightening budgets.
Amidst all of this, it can be nearly impossible for IT professionals to find the time or money to assist business units with their technology needs. Since the individual business units are the ones driving company profits, this presents a real problem for everybody involved.
The business units have problems they need solutions to, and those problems are directly tied to their team’s success. The success of their team is the success of the company, so there are hard costs associated with finding these solutions.
For example, if you’re leading a team of sales staff and they are losing deals because of a technology failure, you aren’t going to sit around and wait for the IT department to find the right solution. The only thing to do is take action, and this is exactly what’s starting to happen in businesses everywhere.
Businesses are increasingly seeing their management teams outside of IT making decisions when it comes to devices, software licenses and many other technology related solutions.
While this might not seem like much of a problem since a solution is being found, anytime you deploy devices and software without the input of the IT department, you create a huge number of potential disasters ranging from lack of support due to varying platforms, security risks due to sharing data with outside vendors, and the possibility of deployed devices not operating on the same security and password protocols as the rest of the company but with access to the company network and data.
Like many complicated problems, the solution to this one will be as complex in nature as the issue itself. There has to be more communication between ALL business units, frank discussions about where budgets for new solutions will come from and strict adherence to existing company guidelines around hardware, software and security.
Here at Wired Networks, we challenge any IT professional reading this to look back over the past year and examine how many decisions that directly affected the company network or data were made without their input. Then, try to establish whether or not your business already has a house divided.
If so, contact us to see how we can help.
