CDI an AHEAD Company

The Three E’s of Excelling in 2021

By CDI

To succeed in these challenging years and beyond, your company more than ever needs to be firing on all cylinders. You have already found new, virtual ways to connect with customers and keep them engaged. You likely did most of this quickly and out of necessity. Consequently, there is probably more work to be done. Are you waiting and watching for more information? Are you taking decisive steps toward scaling existing initiatives that can improve your business no matter what unfolds in 2021? Are you doing a little bit of both?

Some businesses and sectors of the economy will be drastically different for a long time. Some companies, maybe yours, are already seeing that some of those changes you made out of necessity, just might stick around. Will you continue to do more virtual meetings to save travel expenses? Do your employees like working from home? Are you more comfortable measuring their results rather than the amount of time they work? You might agree that, in the near term, it will be increasingly important to control costs. You may even be looking for large-scale ways to improve your bottom line or reduce the impact of lower top-line revenues in the near term. Some of what you implement now, can, of course, be beneficial to continue doing for years to come.

With that in mind, let’s consider the three E’s of excelling: expertise, expand, and efficiency.

Expertise

This year is continuing to bring significant changes that require you to be flexible, adapt, and likely accelerate your company’s digital transformation. Your IT team understands your business and certainly has the capability to learn new technologies, but how do they research all of the tools? How do they get the training they need when a new technology tool is chosen? What will they do when a challenging situation comes up or something that wasn’t covered in the training? Will they be able to drop everything to try fix it or would they need a resource to lean on to solve those challenging problems more quickly? What would be the impact to your organization if your IT team could focus their expertise on your business rather than the mundane “daily lifting” tasks of IT infrastructure and cybersecurity tools? Would you benefit from an arrangement that gave you streamlined access to advanced troubleshooting support so your team didn’t have to spend hours online researching the problem while they wait for manufacturers to pick up the phone and help them?

Expand

Being flexible, adapting, and accelerating digital transformation, may mean that more bandwidth is needed. You might not be able or want to leave behind things that your business is already doing. If most platforms are not going away and your IT team still needs to support them, how do you scale existing initiatives or start new ones? With unemployment drastically shifting from 50-year lows to highs not seen since the great depression, the job market might be in your favor. Can you grab great talent at a great price? Or, do you have to pay up to prevent them from leaving in a couple of months when more jobs open up again? Either way, will the right candidate(s) with the right experience even be available? 

Efficiency 

Digital transformation has brought new technologies that deliver new efficiencies to many businesses. You may already be taking advantage of technologies such as SaaS applications, virtualization across the data center, AI, and more. These technologies open up more opportunities for organizations to further align technology and business. For many organizations, finding efficiencies in managing the technologies and infrastructure they have can be as impactful as the technology itself. As you look to control costs without sacrificing that which will propel your business through 2021, would it be beneficial to find one place to streamline intellectual, talent and physical human capital as well as financial capital?

Technology continues to accelerate at a rapid pace. Scaling your initiatives and improving processes and security can feel overwhelming, especially with the added disruption of the coronavirus pandemic necessitating working from home. The Candoris managed IT services team is here to guide you through all of these questions and more.