How to Fully Leverage Your Rock Star IT Team and Drive Business Innovation

You already know that IT teams are total rock stars. On any given day, IT staff are knee-deep in overseeing day-to-day administrative tasks, working to meet application performance and availability expectations and juggling end-user troubleshooting and security management.

At the same time, they’re tasked with accelerating digital transformation, like executing the strategic migration of core legacy systems and other complex IT infrastructure to new cloud-native environments.

The other reality, however, is that even the best IT teams sometimes struggle to do it all. As a result, IT staff often get mired in the daily “run-and-maintain” tasks (the things that need to be done to keep the business running), leaving the larger business transformation projects on the backburner.

Today, as these transformation projects become increasingly important to drive innovation, competitive advantage and business growth, how can you rectify this disconnect and find the right balance? The good news is there are many things your business can do right now to ensure your team’s valuable time is being put to the best use. We break down the top tips to help you optimize your team and transform into a cost-efficient IT organization.

3 Tips for Freeing Up Your IT Team to Accelerate Transformation

Understand your existing IT estate. According to the Cloud Security Alliance, the average enterprise has 464 custom applications deployed, and IT security professionals are only aware of 38.4% of them. That staggering statistic points to a bigger issue: If you don’t fully know each moving piece of your infrastructure, then you probably don’t have a clear understanding of where IT spend is going and what your actual priorities should be. The best place to get started is taking careful inventory of systems, databases, applications, services and solutions across all your IT environments. Once you know what you have, you can then analyze the viability of each asset and if it’s still needed to achieve your business goals. Eliminating unnecessary or outdated resources will not only ensure your team works on projects that are actually important to the business, but it will help you reduce costs, too.

Gain visibility into your team’s workday. Do you know where your IT team is spending most of its time? In a recent Navicast, Navisite’s VP of Professional Services Steve Woodgate shared that most CIOs want 70% of their IT team’s time spent on value-add projects and the remaining 30% spent on the run-and-maintain tasks.

The reality, however, is that the opposite is true—and CIOs don’t realize it because they aren’t keeping a close eye on time management. To achieve that ideal 70/30 time split, CIOs should follow two simple steps:

• Make sure your team tracks their time. This is the best way to gain awareness of what’s going on and identify opportunities for improvement.

• Make sure end users follow your ticketing system. Those small asks can really add up over time. But with greater visibility into how time is actually being spent, you can optimize efficiency and IT costs to strike a better balance between daily tasks and transformation projects.

Consider outsourcing routine tasks. Despite your best efforts to understand your existing IT estate, sometimes the volume of run-and-maintain activities is simply too overwhelming to manage on top of critical value-add projects. Outsourcing some of these tasks to a managed service provider (MSP) can be a cost-effective option to free up your team’s time, so they can focus on other higher-value projects. This gives you an opportunity to fully leverage your IT team’s unique skills—applying their knowledge of business workflows, proprietary technologies and systems to cost-effectively improve efficiencies and drive innovation.

To discover even more tips to help you optimize your IT team, check out our full eBook, 5 Tips for Running a More Cost-Efficient IT Organization, and watch our short Navicast: Balancing IT Operations with Transformation Projects. For all Navicast episodes go here!