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Enriching Your Organization Through Innovative Technology Partnerships
Chelsea Sauder • January 22, 2019
Whether you’re an organization with 5 people, 50 people, or 250 people, you’ve undoubtedly faced some technical challenges.
Maybe it started with buying a domain name and setting up email. Then, as you grew, your needs evolved to include infrastructure for your office – internet service, routers, wireless access points, printers, and desktop support. Before you knew it, you were expected to select software and online services, and manage to get them implemented, often with limited resources.
The skills required to support the technical aspects of your operations typically fall outside of the core skillsets that your business needs to have on staff, so you turn to vendors. Soon you may end up with a laundry list of outsourced service providers that you’re left to manage – trading the job of fumbling through technology decisions for a job chasing vendors and discovering that they don’t communicate well with each other. You can’t help but think that there must be a better way to get this done.
Of course, there is! And it definitely doesn’t mean putting all of your eggs in one basket with one of those “we do it all” providers, either. Partnering with a technology consulting firm to provide leadership through these activities contributes to an optimal outcome and significantly reduces the drag on your organization. These firms frequently lead complex projects and know the questions to ask to keep these projects on track.
What does it mean for your technology partner to be innovative? In the past few months, we’ve had quite a few examples of innovative problem solving to help our clients succeed. Let’s look at a couple of these…
Our infrastructure team was contacted to lead the technology component of an office relocation between floors within an office building. Pretty standard job – move the internet service, confirm/repair cabling in the suite, setup new network equipment, and support users on their first day in the new office. Now for the hard part…we only had 3 weeks to make the move, it had to be a hot cutover with the internet in place on the original floor on Friday afternoon and the new floor Monday morning, and for the best part – the office was in another country with no local resources and a language barrier. The initial estimate for just the internet relocation by the service provider was longer than our entire project timeline. Our team utilized their deep industry experience to identify alternative methods of moving the internet without relying on the service provider and selected the best local vendor to execute our plan. Furthermore, we identified local retailers able to provide the required network equipment – eliminating a likely customs fiasco. Once everything was put in motion, we traveled onsite to provide management and oversight. At one point, we uncovered phone lines outside of our scope which were expected to be moved but had been skipped, setting our client up to be without their primary phone numbers on Monday morning. Our team jumped into action and provided a temporary workaround leveraging other wiring in the building to keep the client operational for 3 weeks until the telephone company could formally relocate the connections. Ultimately, the client agreed that despite being an accelerated project with numerous complicating factors, the first morning in the new office was one of the least eventful go-lives they could recall.
With another client, we were implementing software-as-a-service solutions for business process automation and encountered limitations imposed by the IT group restricting “custom development” – leaving our options as “configuration” only. Suddenly, things that might have taken just a couple of lines of code now seemed daunting. Our team approached this opportunity head-on and invested additional time in the Design phase of the project to orchestrate functionality meeting all of the client’s requirements with out of the box capabilities in the tool. This was ultimately a success for everyone, from the business group to the IT support team, as they were given a fully functional solution that could be supported using their in-house skill sets.
There are numerous components when it comes to technology in your organization – and we don’t pretend to work on all of them (nobody should…). Our commitment is to help you envision the optimal overarching solutions through Enterprise Architecture, select the right platforms and vendors with a cohesive Technology Strategy, and lead execution through Design and Implementation.
Does your organization have a technology partner who takes the time to understand your whole business and provide innovative solutions which account for the entire context of your technology landscape? Have questions on getting started? Contact us here
and let’s talk!
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