Around the world, the new year is a time for celebration. It’s a time to reflect and a time we typically resolve to make the most of coming 12 months. We do this by leaving last year’s problems precisely where they belong, in the past year.
Many manage to adopt this approach in their personal lives, but it pays enormous dividends to apply it to our businesses too.
Cleaning up open issues from previous years gives you and your team free reign to make the next year a record-breaking success with nothing to hold you back. Intermittent IT problems, network slowdowns, printing issues, and unavailable resources can all be left in the past.
Starting the year off with a clean IT slate simply leaves you to handle the business areas which you do best.
Set Your Network Straight
If your only relationship with IT last year involved calls to fix broken systems then it is time to have your IT fixed up for good. Break-fix relationships can add stress to both your company and your IT provider.
While getting up and running fast and fixing breaks to get back on track is a clear priority, more can be done to ensure breaks don’t happen and downtime is avoided. Repeated break-fix call outs waste large amounts of time to troubleshoot, diagnose, and patch an unfamiliar system every time it has an issue.
Using IT to set you up right means using knowledge and experience gained over time to right the ship and keep the whole system working together.
The same experience configuring your network top to bottom can be called on again to update or change it as requirements and projects shift. With a complete system picture, less time can be spent on troubleshooting, and more can be allocated to just getting work done.
Sports Car IT
IT with long-standing issues and bugs, ones that staff have gotten accustomed to working around, can be like running an old vehicle. It’s often more expensive to maintain an old car than purchase something more modern requiring less maintenance. An old car requires more parts, becomes less efficient, uses more oil, and is more likely to suffer breakdowns too. The same is true of old IT.
The cost over time of a well-configured system can often be the same or even less than fixing broken issues on the old one. The difference is a dramatic difference in downtime and lost productivity. Better IT means getting where you need to be, faster.
Your Staff Deserve IT
Nothing distracts employees from a task more than unexpected downtime or systems failures. Whether getting crucial documents Friday afternoon, or attempting to settle into work Monday morning; bad IT is frustrating, disheartening, and time-consuming.
One of the hardest but most rewarding elements to cultivate in a company is good staff morale. When you have it, productivity goes up, turnover goes down, and the business environment is vastly improved for everyone. When you don’t have it, the workday is that much tougher for everyone.
Workflow issues are well known to be one of the top contributors to poor morale. Slow machines, unavailable printing, and interruptions cause more knock-on issues than just the IT department can fix. Good employees need and deserve the right tools for the job.
A Better Way to Operate
Use the new year as a golden opportunity for a fresh start on your IT. An assessment of your system by IT professionals will diagnose issues and give you a complete guide to get back on track. Whether caused by a configuration error, bad devices, or something else; we’ll track down the causes and leave them to be forgotten about.
There’s never a better time to establish a managed IT services relationship. Contracting professional services can put an end to system bottlenecks, configure your system right, and advise on the best course to take into the new year.
The most important decision you can take into the year ahead is to stop addressing IT issues as they happen. Take charge of your IT and fix the underlying causes holding you up.
Get in touch today to start a service relationship that will see your business take off into a very happy new year.