How can your products be better? And how might customer service better meet client needs? What can you do to simultaneously satisfy your stakeholders and ensure your company is sustainable? Do you see opportunities for automation? IT solutions can help solve real business problems for the future.

If you spend too many resources — time, money, and people-power — doing things the way they’ve always been done, you know it’s time to change. Look for IT support from a firm with proven experience that can take care of your day to day needs so you have the space to research, test, and implement business innovations.

Key IT Strategies that Drive Innovation:

• Shift to unified endpoint management. Is your company drowning in devices, operating systems, wearables and everything IOT-related? Moving to a UEM will help better manage all your business’ devices and operating systems. It gives your IT team the control to “personalize access to specific applications and content based on business processes and business roles, usage history, and context, regardless of whether the device itself is owned by the user or the company,” according to Solutions Review. A unified platform consolidates management tools and reduces the need to track vendor agreements and product updates, which ultimately saves your business money.

• Eye your competition. What are your competitors doing? What companies do you look to for inspiration? Do you want to be the next Amazon, Google or Apple? Your competition will only help you grow. Arthur Weiss, managing director of Aware, which helps businesses gain competitive intelligence, told Inc., that “by monitoring competitors on an ongoing basis you get to know their behavior and so can start to anticipate what they will be likely to do next. You can then plan your own strategies so that you keep your customers and win (not steal) customers away from competitors.” The Harvard Business Review even advises to make your competition work for you, especially if your company is scaling. Taking this advice to the fullest, you might consider partnering with a competitor to offer a joint product with integrated features. Leveraging your unique expertise might lead to increased revenue and credibility while also reducing marketing and development for a product that ultimately has more value for the customer.

• Implement big-picture projects. How can your IT innovators deliver on big-picture projects if they’re bogged down with help desk complaints and getting workstations set up? Your in-house IT team needs to inspire confidence and trust. Empower your IT innovators to think strategically and give them the resources they need to apply their expertise towards big-picture business solutions. This requires a three-step process: ideate, test, and implement. Allow the IT team to come up with ideas, test those ideas, and if the testing phase is successful, implement them. The innovation process is a continuous cycle: understand where you are, decide where you want to be, and establish the activities to move forward. If your IT team needs technical skills, provide training and continuing education, which helps increase employee satisfaction and empowers them with the tools they need to help you adapt for the future.

• Plan for the future. Do you know what digital transformation looks like for your business? Embark on a visioning process to imagine the possibilities. Your business isn’t likely to remain vibrant if you aren’t able to invest in a commitment to digital transformation. Use an IT partner experienced in providing user ready IT to help realize your digital transformation goals. Digital transformation begins with you, as it requires leadership that can align departmental stakeholders behind a clear vision,” CIO notes. As you consider a strategy for your company’s digital transformation, define engagements and metrics and how external IT support can help you reach your company’s overarching goal.

Read our other posts in this series on the long-term value of IT here.