Your business needs to be poised for innovation, which requires work and intentional leadership amidst our changing economic landscape. Your long-term view of IT’s role in your business’ future matters. Consider the following questions:

• Do you view IT as critical to adding value and helping transform the way your business gets done?
• What’s your business culture?
• Are you investing in your IT team?

If you’re solely focused on satisfying clients’ immediate needs, you might fall prey to this common story: “Ironically, CEOs of some consulting and IT firms are keen to develop a suite of digital solutions to help clients. But appeared less enthusiastic and unclear about their own transformation agenda.” Partnering with an IT expert to take care of your user ready IT gives you a competitive advantage that drives business growth. It allows you to get out from under the burden of putting out day to day fires, and instead make purposeful investments in your in-house team of IT innovators.

As an experienced leader, you know that transformation is possible when you purposefully shift priorities. Instead of investing in OEM-specific trainings for your in house team that may or may not help you source products at lower prices, turn to an established and knowledgeable IT firm to help you acquire the right IT products at the right prices.

Provide training geared towards management and creative problem-solving that equip your in-house team with tools to strategize how IT can drive business solution improvements. Appropriate training and continuing education helps increase employee satisfaction as well as the team’s ability to respond to changing business needs. Numbers back up this claim. According to Gallup, for businesses with highly engaged teams, profitability increased by 21 percent, sales productivity by 20 percent, and output quality by 40 percent. The 

When you view your IT team as an investment, you make time and space for IT staff to participate in big business conversations, bring technical knowledge to the table, and prototype and implement strategies to accelerate the business. Take some concrete steps in the right direction:

• If your IT department is literally buried in the basement or even working in a closed-off area, physically move your in-house IT team into a collaborative, centrally located workspace.

• People in IT have a reputation for being introverted or awkward, perhaps because they haven’t been integrated into the work environment. Engage the IT team with senior leadership — hire a CIO to design management programming that draws out insights from the IT team’s collective knowledge.

• Seek out external IT support with proven analytical and problem-solving capabilities to provide user ready IT and free up your internal IT team to focus on mission-driven projects.

• Invest in a unified endpoint management to provide user ready IT across all devices and manage diverse endpoints (including desktop, mobile and IoT) consistently.

“As the internet economy emerges, and as big data and analytics continue to transform the way business gets done today, IT needs to become a value center, if not a profit center,” CIO notes.

The emerging technology requires new skills for your IT team — and added investment — but the potential for your employees, and business, is endless.