Breaking Through the Glass Ceiling for Your IT Support
In this article, Greg discusses how Network Overdrive’s IT solutions can take your company further than other IT services. Watch the video or read the transcription below to find out more.
Hello, and thank you for joining me. My name’s Greg Clarkson, managing director of Network Overdrive. Today I want to talk about a problem that can happen between yourself and your IT provider normally a couple of years into the relationship with them.
Initially when you first engage a third party IT provider you generally have a list of things for them to do so they can busily get active fixing those issues. However, after those issues are resolved for you, normally the relationship dies down into just dealing with routine tasks. I find many business owners at this phase start to wonder what is happening in my relationship and where is it going. Yes, they might be able to fix problems when I call them up, but I feel like the relationship is in a rut.
If you have this feeling, I’d like to suggest that it’s because your IT provider has hit a glass ceiling and doesn’t know how to break through that glass ceiling to take itself and you the business into the new level. What is missing in the relationship is an understanding of the strategic relationship and direction that’s required between an IT provider and you as the business owner. At Network Overdrive we have developed a model that helps us and our customers quickly identify strategic direction. This model has five levels, and what we do is place the business on one of these levels.
The first level is chaotic where random things happen and you don’t know why. Then, the next level is reactive where IT issues come up, you respond and fix them, they go away, and then you wait for the next problem to occur. After reactive there’s proactive where you ask the IT provider to do certain things on a regular basis for yourself. Generally, I find that businesses can easily identify which level their business is currently at, whether it’s chaotic or reactive or proactive, and then we can work with them on how to move them to the next level.
The glass ceiling with most IT providers tends to happen around the proactive stage. They know how to take a business from chaotic to reactive to proactive and then get stuck at this level, and they’re content to only be able to do regular routine proactive tasks for you. This is where the business owner can feel like they’re stuck in a rut. What we do with this model is it drives us to continue to think strategically for you about how we can deliver value and then profit for your business.
To get to the fifth stage we have to align IT practice with your business goals. The more we understand what you’re trying to do in your business the better we can align IT to enable you to be competitive in the marketplace. In my experience, when a business owner understands this model they can then start to use it for themselves in evaluating advice, whether that advice comes from us or another source, and they can ask themselves does this piece of advice on what I should be doing with my IT help me move my business along the strategic model. If the answer is yes you can see the benefits then you can approve that advice and enjoy it for yourself and your business.
If you’d like to know more about how to break through the glass ceiling in your IT operations and have your IT operations be strategically aligned with your business, then contact us on 1300 368 928 or fill in the online form.
Thank you.