Improve Your IT budget Forecasting

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As the year comes to a close, you have to write the IT budget and spending benchmarks. You must understand the current IT infrastructure and forecast technology needs. This article shares three key areas to improve forecasting and maybe save budget too.

#1 Unexpected IT expenses

First, it helps to identify where you are blowing your IT budget. Often IT budget inaccuracies can be traced back to unexpected tech expenses. Repairs, replacements, and unanticipated upgrades can all throw your budget out of whack. Unfortunately, emergency repairs and last-minute technology improvements are the most costly.

But without a crystal ball, you can’t predict what’s going to happen, right? Still, you can make a plan that allows you to avoid wasting money on the break-fix model. Partnering with a managed service provider (MSP), you will typically pay a set monthly fee. Then, if something does go wrong, you have IT experts at the ready to address the issue.

Plus, a good MSP will work to determine the expected life cycles of your tech assets. That way, you can anticipate hardware or software upgrades and budget accordingly. Further, your MSP should work proactively to prevent unexpected downtime. They can help protect you from cyberattacks and keep software and hardware updated and patched.

#2 Bloated IT infrastructure

Overlapping and wasted resources are another big IT budget drain. You could be paying for many devices that do the same thing, or you may be continuing to license software that your team no longer uses. Or it may be software that everyone uses, and you could be getting a much better deal. You might also be paying for tech you haven’t upgraded, so you aren’t getting the full return on your investment.

An MSP can help identify these kinds of issues. Bringing in an IT expert provides an objective view of your infrastructure. They can suggest performance improvements and streamline processes. They may also suggest subscriptions or other packages that can help you save funds.

#3 IT and business misalignment

The plan is always to build a budget for an IT strategy that helps achieve business goals. Yep, doing so depends on your tech know-how and good communication.

Further, tech-business alignment has grown more difficult as infrastructure has changed, plus, the workforce is now more distributed. The business could have on-premises technology as well as cloud-based software. Employees could be bringing in their own devices and/or working remotely. As a result, business tech needs to be doing more. Plus, it needs to keep up with rapid evolutions and cybersecurity threats.

Yet investing in IT-business alignment improves budgets, and benefits workers and customers. Potential advantages include:

  • reduced digital friction;
  • improved user experience;
  • greater customer engagement;
  • cutting costs;
  • improving productivity;
  • gaining visibility of business processes;
  • faster delivery times and speed to market;
  • growing your competitive advantage;
  • driving innovation.

Work with an MSP to bridge business acumen and IT expertise. Then, you can better calculate the financial impacts (costs and ROIs) of your IT plan.

Need help understanding IT budget pitfalls and spending benchmarks? We can help plan for tech spending supporting your business objectives going forward. Contact us at (515)422-1995.

Talk to Your Staff About Tech Success and Stumbling Blocks

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You may be in charge of tech for your entire business, but that doesn’t mean you actually use all the technology you source, install, and maintain. You’re responsible for updating that tech, supporting it, and monitoring for threats, yet you don’t have hands-on with that tech day in and day out. That means you can’t fully understand what’s working and what isn’t.

To gain a holistic picture of how your technology is working, ask the people who use it every day. You can’t rely on the fact that people aren’t complaining to mean your hardware or software is running smoothly.

There are many reasons employees might not reach out to tell you what’s wrong:

  • They are too busy to bring up their issues.
  • They don’t know how to communicate what’s holding them up.
  • They don’t realize that the obstacle they’re hitting isn’t normal for a particular solution.
  • They don’t know who to talk to about the problems they are having.

So, it’s up to you to be proactive. Reach out to employees to find out what they need to do their jobs better.

Gain the employee’s perspective

If you’re in IT, you’re seldom found in the trenches with your sales or marketing. You aren’t in accounting trying to track payments or keep up with supply-chain management. So, you can’t expect to know what the lived experience of your tech is like for those teams.

Talking to your staff about what’s needed can help you learn about:

  • digital solutions your people have heard about from peers at other companies;
  • new technologies staff would like to try;
  • roadblocks that are slowing productivity and undermining employee morale;
  • low-hanging-fruit changes that you can make to improve an employee’s experience (e.g. adding a second screen may be all that a disgruntled staffer needs to see their job isn’t so bad).

You might host a lunch-and-learn, where you discuss technology with different teams, or you could send around a survey. Emailing employees directly, and asking them to answer key questions can help, too. Focus your information gathering in three areas:

  • What works well for you?
  • What challenges are you facing?
  • What would make your life easier?

Of course, people are going to have different ways of speaking about technology. They probably don’t know a LAN from a PAN or a WAN, for example, but they will be able to convey whether they feel the network is too slow or not.

Prioritize tech solutions

Talking to people in the trenches with tech can help set infrastructure priorities. Once you’ve learned what tech is needed and what isn’t working as you’d hoped, reach out to a managed service provider for help. We can consult on new solutions and help you streamline business processes. We know tech for small businesses. Contact us today at (515)422-1995.

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