It is unlikely that anyone who starts a business knows absolutely everything about all of the areas of their company. After all, this would demand expertise in finance, accounting, marketing, management and IT, just to name a few.
Using consultancy services such as IT consultants is a great way of adding more expertise to your company without stretching a leadership team too thin. Read on to learn what an IT consultancy is and see all of the benefits of using an IT consultant in your business.
What is IT consultancy?
IT consultancy is a third-party service that some companies turn to when looking to improve the standard of their IT infrastructure and services. These consist of experts examining the current needs and systems that a business has, comparing them to the IT options available and creating a plan for better IT infrastructure using all of this information.
Consultancy services also include ongoing support and assistance for a company in the event of outages and changing strategy over time.
The Benefits of Using IT Consultancy
There are plenty of benefits of using IT consultancy services in a business that have a positive impact across all departments of a company. Some of the main advantages to consider include:
Cost Efficiency
From a management perspective, financial efficiency is everything. Even if you’re seeking to promote a culture of co-working and community in your business above profit, earning money is still what lets you do that. You maximise this by making everything as efficient as possible and getting the most from your investment, including in your IT systems.
An IT consultancy can look at your company’s systems and services, understand the hardware needs of each of your processes and get the equipment necessary for each of the tasks. There’s a much lower risk of overspending on unnecessary equipment and the likelihood of having low-quality equipment that can’t get the job done is eliminated.
Greater Productivity
A productive business is a profitable business, and IT consultancies are one of the best ways of driving productivity. “Bottlenecks” refer to when a company’s productivity falls due to something clogging up the process such as hardware or software that isn’t able to complete particular tasks or employees that aren’t trained in these areas. No matter how hard someone earlier in the process works, if there is a bottleneck later then it will inevitably slow.
Effective IT consultancy teams examine a company and look for potential bottlenecks in the IT side of the business. By finding these bottlenecks, consultants then take active steps to remove them and find a solution, whether that’s training staff on a new system or adding much-needed hardware or software. Your entire company works more effectively when any major technical bottlenecks are out of the way.
Better Emergency Response
Companies in all industries are likely to deal with technical emergencies at some point in their operations. This could be a server being wiped for no apparent reason, a computer failing to work or even a cyberattack that targets all of the data that the company possesses. A business working independently would struggle to respond appropriately, potentially leading to permanent reputational damage for the organisation.
Consultants have experience working with companies in similar situations and creating an effective response to the issues. You can be back online in no time at all, ready to explain the situation to your customers and get back to selling your products to anyone that needs them. Digital outages can feel extremely dangerous for your business, but there are steps that you can take to respond to them properly.
Simplifies Data Transition
Data is becoming a fundamental part of all businesses, with software and hardware all providing teams with more advanced and intricate metrics than ever before. These provide companies with an opportunity to learn more about their own work, finding inefficiencies and using them to work in a more productive manner. However, in businesses where nobody is a data expert, this tends to fall by the wayside.
Implementing IT consultancy in your team means that you have a group of people with an understanding of the data available. They can train your internal members of staff on essential processes such as data analysis and visualisation, making better decision-making a core part of how the business works.
You evolve your workplace’s processes more rapidly and keep up with ever-changing trends, helping to retain a competitive edge that keeps you ahead of rivals in the same field.
Improves Management Focus
People can only effectively focus on one thing at once. There’s a reason that the biggest companies in the world departmentalise, with heads of marketing, development, compliance and more in each company that a multinational operates in. Having IT be its own entity with its own staffing and procurement needs distracts from the focus that an executive has on the important work, especially for small businesses with just a couple of managers.
Using an external consultancy is a great solution for this. The extent of attention it takes is to hire the consultancy, then any IT management or infrastructure needs are dealt with by the third party. Managers can focus on what they do best, setting out strategies for greater business growth and success in the future. Specialisation is at the heart of better business, and IT consultancy enables exactly that.
Is IT consultancy worthwhile?
If you run a small company, IT consultancy is without a doubt worth investing in. Whilst the costs may appear large at face value, they are much lower than the cost of hiring a dedicated team to work with you and lower yet than having to pay fines for data breaches or the lost potential revenue from not maximising your work.
Take your time when choosing an IT consultancy and create a plan bespoke for your company’s requirements, but regardless of your business structure, you need intelligent IT decision-making somewhere in the organisation.
Why choose Eventura as your Managed IT Service Provider?
Eventura has been providing managed IT services to countless customers for 20 years. Our talented team of people can help you identify all your businesses IT needs and engineer bespoke IT solutions that have real-world benefits to your business.
We are also NetSuite Solution Providers and Sage 200 Business Partners, offering game-changing ERP solutions crafted to automate and streamline business processes.
If you would like to speak to one of our experts, you can request a free call back here.
