Too many systems. Duplicated data. Inefficient processes. How many times have the tools intended to enable your organization actually stifled productivity or created cost overruns?
We in IT know better than anyone that every solution is implemented with good intentions to address a specific need at a given time. But over months and years, legacy systems persist alongside new, functionality grows and overlaps, and temporary fixes become permanent.
It’s easy for IT – and by extension the business as a whole – to become weighed down by the proliferation of systems and data. How, then, do we prevent today’s solutions from becoming tomorrow’s problems? The answer is in holistic oversight.
Oversight through perspective
When you and your team are working hard to deliver new projects, maintain data integrity and keep your systems stable, you often do not have the time or capacity to advocate for high-level process changes.
Even if you could scrounge up a couple of hours to identify and share opportunities for improvement, obtaining agreement at a policy or process level is a task that most people wouldn’t dream of taking on – knowing it would be an ongoing, uphill battle.
The reality is that most IT professionals at the employee and management levels are not experts in explaining the value of organizational change in terms that will resonate with our business counterparts. Especially when the right change may not be an IT solution at all.
In fact, being embedded in the day-to-day operation of the IT organization often doesn’t even afford you the ability to initiate requests for change. Instead, you are stuck working around bad data or process.
Sometimes it takes an outside perspective to challenge the status quo – someone to look beyond the clutter and see the bigger picture. Someone who can evaluate legacy systems against your organization’s future needs. Someone who can invest time to find a workable path forward, without any pre-conceived bias.
Most importantly, sometimes an outside voice can be the one to help you communicate the massive value to be gained – both within IT and the rest of your organization – from undertaking meaningful change.
Engaging an advocate for change
At cShell, we help IT organizations advocate for the right change at the right time. Our high-level framework helps you better understand and measure the potential long-term impacts of the strategies you pursue today, modelling the results of various possible solutions.
Taking a holistic view of your system architecture and data-management requirements, we help you identify the key pain points currently inhibiting efficiency so you can choose your best path forward. As you determine your team’s ideal evolutionary path, we guide you in communicating the value of system change, data cleanup and process re-engineering to the broader organization.
Our findings are based on your own delivery data so you can measure successes and challenges – and support your change requests – in a way that makes sense for you and your business partners: with the dollars-and-cents impact on your current plan.
Let us help you adopt holistic oversight to manage system, data and process overload. With an unbiased, wide-angle view, cShell can assess both what you need to streamline your portfolio today while preparing you for tomorrow’s challenges.