What a digital service provider can do for your organisation
Technology is viewed as an important differentiator for mid-sized organisations to challenge larger, more established businesses. But, while agility is often on their side, budgets and resources are not.
Constrained by resource and budget
According to Gartner, IT departments for midsize organizations are typically a limited resource. Roughly 60 percent of IT roles in the midmarket are versatile by necessity due to understaffing. Despite being smaller in stature than their larger counterparts, mid-market organisations still need most, if not all, of the capabilities a large enterprise requires.
Given this, it’s perhaps no surprise that for IT departments in the mid-market, much of their time is spent on operational activities. Over three quarters of respondents in a multinational survey of senior IT professionals said the pressure on operational processes is increasing.
Yet, the challenges for IT teams is further exacerbated when you add support for new initiatives into the mix, e.g. monitoring and management activity associated with digital customer engagement, IoT and machine learning to name but a few.
Innovation on the horizon
Despite the operational pressure, mid-sized organisations see the opportunity for IT to play a greater role in transformation. According to a Deloitte survey of 500 senior executives from mid-market companies, they are deploying new tools, as well as removing barriers that slow their adoption.
Furthermore, according to Deloitte, the mid-market is:
- Increasing IT budgets to capture productivity gains. Sixty-nine percent of respondents say their companies’ IT budgets are higher than last year.
- More than a third now spend more than five percent of their revenue on technology.
- Furthermore, a growing number of organisations are aligning business and technology requirements and implementing new governance practices.
- And, many companies also cite stronger collaboration between IT and business leaders in managing the IT agenda.
In addition, Gartner names three top technology areas where mid-size organisations are currently spending the highest amount of their budgets. These are BI and analytics, cloud services and solutions, and finally, cybersecurity. The innovation focus is very much alive and kicking.
Filling the gap
However, to truly innovate, mid-sized organisations need to address a multitude of challenges:
- Skills: They’re lacking necessary IT skills to innovate. The biggest talent gaps in the midmarket for IT departments include security and risk, information/ analytics and business analysts – the very areas they’re investing in.
- Affordability: Midsize enterprises want IT solutions that fit within their financial means and available resources but struggle to find ones that are affordable
- The pace of new technology: They’re finding it challenging to keep up with new technologies
All of this hinders the ability to focus on what they’re truly good at – adding value to the business. However, this is where a service provider can help you deliver upon your digital strategy. Adopting as-a-service models and shifting workloads and applications into the cloud, can advance your organisation’s digital capabilities.
But what are some of the things you could utilise the as-a-service model for?
The rise of as-a-service
The consumerisation of IT has seen people embrace a mobile-first, cloud environment. This makes sense for businesses to adopt, given the agility and cost efficiencies it brings. And, it’s not just simple applications such as business email and mobile apps being pushed into the cloud. Other, sizeable workloads, such as disaster recovery, storage, database and CRM can all be accessed as-a-service too.
This means pretty much all business information and systems are accessible and up-to-date whenever they’re needed. Accordingly, this helps employees work remotely, gaining access to critical information instantly. Imagine being in a customer meeting and making decisions based data in real time, rather than delaying it with a trip back to the office. Above all, as-a-service enables your teams to work highly efficiently without sacrificing security or quality of work.
Furthermore, the ability to have increasingly technical workloads moved to the as-a-service model facilitates the democratisation of infrastructure. For mid-sized organisations, this is worth its weight in gold. With so much time and energy spent on the operational side of IT, moving infrastructure to the cloud levels the playing field to compete with larger enterprises. They can choose the services they need, whenever they need, all managed by a passionate partner.
This new approach is changing entire business models for organisations in the mid-market, where to whom, these types of services were generally cost and skills prohibitive. Now, instead of simply keeping the lights on, IT departments can focus on what they do best with their extremely limited resources – that is, truly making a difference to their organisation.
