Key Themes
- What about the challenges of multiple locations and changing technology?
- IT strategy that changes with your business
- Track commercials
- Proactively manage risks
Industry Problem
Your business is growing, your business model is working. As it grows, the IT challenges you face also change. It stops becoming simply about “fixing” problems as and when they occur, but more about
IT strategy,
governance, security, risk and compliance.
Depending on the sector the business operates within, this transition normally occurs when a business grows above 50 staff. It starts earlier if the business operates in a regulated sector like financial services and starts later in sectors like marketing. However, irrespective of the sector, it will happen as the business grows.
As the challenges change they often require services or skills not available from the current
IT support provider which inevitably leads to a growing gap between what is required and what is delivered.
The Uniti® Solution
To ensure the services we provide today continue to be relevant tomorrow we have made IT Strategy a fundamental part of the Uniti® offering.
However, we do not mean the type of strategy that sits in a document never to be reviewed, but a living and breathing plan which changes with your business.
IT Strategy is captured in our “
dynamic IT roadmap”, which is available to clients via their Apex® portal, and can be updated by both Wavex and our clients. This is formed of three core components:
Strategic – These are the initiatives that change your IT to align with your business strategy. Every business is different so the IT initiatives are different too. A business that plans to buy other businesses will have
IT services focused on scalability. A business that operates in a regulated sector will have services focused around compliance. Some businesses do not change very fast, so their strategy may be to simply keep things running reliably.
Service – The service component is focused at improving existing services. After every piece of work we carry out for our clients we ask ourselves how this could be done better or how could the support issue have been avoided? This generates a wealth of information used to continually improve the service.
Risk – Importantly we take a proactive position with risk. Instead of waiting for something to fail or be hacked, we continually look for weaknesses in clients’ technology. This provides us with a dynamic risk-assessment. How secure are the printers? Are all applications patching up-to-date? Is there risky software used within the business? This and many more criteria are assessed every single month. These are added to the Risk component of the roadmap.
These roadmap components come together into our 3D Roadmap.
There is also a commercial aspect. Many technologies get cheaper as they mature and competition heats up. This is why we align our pricing with Microsoft RRP which means clients continue to get the commercial advantages. And we provide our clients their own
IT commercial dashboard, again available via our online portal. This shows every penny they spend, its category, and links to the various invoices. We believe that a partnership is based on trust, so we share everything with our clients.
The commercial dashboard covers the following areas:-
Invoice Analysis – breaking down the invoice into categories and presenting these on a monthly basis.
Hosting Unit Analysis – presenting volumes and how these change on a monthly basis.
Vendor Analysis – what vendors represent what proportion of the monthly invoice
Invoice Payment – invoice payment days history
Users added on a monthly basis – self explanatory
Department IT consumption – how much IT resources are consumed by each of your departments
New User Calendar – the date’s different staff joined the business.
By managing these components and making continual enhancements to the services we ensure the service delivers greater value from one year to the next.
