What you need to know about Business Technology Consulting
What is Business Technology Consulting?
In today’s hyper-connected society its likely that your business makes use of technology in many forms in order to deliver your product or services. Business technology consultants will audit and assess the way you currently use information technology and provide specialised advice that relates to how you could leverage your resources more strategically to achieve longer term, broader business goals. We present this advice in the form a business technology strategy.
Why do I need a business technology strategy?
Small to medium sized businesses and indeed businesses of all sizes looking to innovate and transform their business and survive in the digital economy of the future are in need of a new business model. The majority of businesses today are lacking a comprehensive and coherent business technology strategy that serves as the essential platform to unify the way technology is leveraged across all the arms of the business in achieving its goals. Given that a lack of strategy is cited as the number one reason for digital transformation project failure, businesses can no longer afford to take an ad-hoc approach to business technology.
What are the benefits of working with a business technology consultant?
A business technology consultant will assist your business to transition from taking a reactive approach to business technology planning and implementation toward taking a proactive and intentional approach to leveraging technology to achieve your goals. With a seat at your decision-making table, a business technology consultant will assist you to design and implement your business technology strategy based on:
- Years of business and consulting experience working across many different businesses and industry verticals
- Insights into challenges and problems commonly faced by businesses and fresh ideas on how to overcome them.
- A fresh set of eyes to your business with the capability to objectively examine your business challenges from an outside perspective.
- A highly strategic focus that allows them to sit apart from the day-to-day rumblings of your business.
- Specialised expertise and industry connections that businesses are unlikely to have access to or capacity to maintain as their industry changes so rapidly.
What types of projects do Business Technology Consultants work on?
At Maxsum, we offer three modes of engaging with our business technology consulting expertise.
- The Maxsum Business Technology Review (BTR): Entails a comprehensive audit of your current systems and processes and culminates in the formation of a Business Technology Strategy that maps out where your business wants to go and how it can best leverage technology to get there.
- Virtual Chief Information Officer (vCIO) Services: Is an ongoing regular engagement where we provide business technology consulting knowledge and expertise around your decision-making table that you might not be able to resource at a C-level yourself full-time.
- Project Consulting: Is designed to map out a specific upgrade or implementation project to ensure that it is strategically planned and delivered against a set of determined milestones and metrics.
What’s the difference between Business Technology Consulting and Managed IT Services?
The traditional “you break it, we fix it” model of IT service delivery is simply no longer enough to ensure that businesses can keep pace with technology change in the digital age. Working with a Managed IT Services Provider ensures that your technology and processes are incrementally, proactively and securely maintained and driven forward to keep you ahead of the curve. But not all Managed IT Service providers have the strategic expertise to take a top-down view of your business to ensure you’re headed in the right direction strategically.
The first step on your business’ digital transformation journey must be to leverage the expertise of a business technology consultant to develop a robust and forward-looking digital transformation and business technology strategy for your organisation.
Then the second step is to work with a Managed IT Services provider to implement your strategy and ensure that your desired outcomes are realised.
Finding the right people to form this strategic and operational digital transformation partnership with is critical and hinges on finding partners who align with your business on purpose and culture.
Maxsum is uniquely positioned to be able to provide business technology consulting services and managed services expertise that cover both your strategic and operational technology needs along your digital transformation journey.
