Is your internal IT team feeling burnt out and buried under a pile of tech issues? Achieve more, stress less and empower your team by blending with outside partners. According to a statistical data report, 49 percent of companies outsource IT functions to free up resources and apply greater focus on core business. The right IT professional services team can give you answers to tough problems, help fuel growth with tailored solutions and guide your business toward digital transformation.

Like many business leaders, you might feel caught in a whirlwind of technology. Chasing after  changes is frustrating and can negatively affect your growth and ultimately your profitability. Working with a business technology consultant to clarify a technology strategy provides a rudder to navigate shifting winds. With the right technology, your business can stay on top of budgeting concerns while meeting critical goals.

Let’s take a look at the top three reasons why you should blend your internal IT team with an outside partner:

1. Actionable Roadmapping

An IT professional services partner can take care of your short- and long-term needs with an actionable roadmap. CIO Wiki tells us a technology roadmap is a visual representation of the journey to an objective, goal or value. To dig deeper, an actionable roadmap allows you to design a strategic-level plan for organizational IT initiatives, such as migrating the company’s data to a new cloud system or upgrading the organization to a new enterprise software platform.

There are several purposes for a technology roadmap, as it not only communicates plans that will directly affect your company’s internal systems and processes, but it also gives you the ability to:

• Paint a clear picture of your company’s IT infrastructure abilities and how they align with business outcomes.
• Address any current IT issues.
• Cut costs by removing any unnecessary technologies and applications.
• Increase productivity by implementing technology that serves your immediate needs.
• Improve IT and cybersecurity. 
• Avoid or mitigate against system failures by uncovering any weaknesses in your IT infrastructure.
• Estimate short-term budgets and long-term capital expenses.
• Resolve any conflicts around business priorities.
• Prepare for digital transformation.

2. Digital Transformation

With an IT professional services team, you can increase the return on your technology investment, get ahead with actionable data insights, give employees the tools they need to achieve business objectives and connect all facets of your organization through digital transformation. The impact of technology has been felt across industries, especially those that deal with data processing. Digital transformation provides a model for companies to reimagine how they use technology, people and processes to drive more business and respond to changing customer expectations.

Not only has the number of companies implementing digital technologies increased exponentially but so has the speed of adoption, accelerating from several years to just months. Companies must be willing to embrace technology or risk getting left behind.

Some of the benefits of digital transformation include:

• Improved productivity and efficiency. Having an IT infrastructure that meets modern demands is key to getting more done and streamlined operations. 
• Sharpened competitive edge. Responsiveness is crucial for gaining a competitive advantage in any industry. Digital transformation enables organizations to quickly adapt to changing market conditions and customer demands.
• Reduced cost and errors. Manual processes are more prone to human error than automated processes and they can drive up cost. By building a next-gen infrastructure, your systems and processes will be more robust, reducing wasteful errors that cut into your bottom line.
• Boosted employee engagement and morale. Giving your workers the tools they need to achieve business objectives is critical for increased employee satisfaction. When your team feels supported and valued, engagement and morale go up. Digital transformation is particularly important as remote work increases, making technology the backbone of operations.

3. Updated IT Systems and Solutions

No matter what type of business you’re in, technology is too important to relegate to the sidelines. Reinforcements come in the form of IT professional services.  Spend less time sweating the details of IT systems and more time meeting your goals and objectives. 

Partnering with an IT professional services team can offer your business many benefits:

• Tech guidance and expertise to help you drive business goals
• Infrastructure and architecture consulting to strengthen security, increase productivity and show a return on technology investments
• Digital cloud migration to protect data and safely  connect anywhere, any time, any place
• IT optimization and integration to stay up to date with software and digital solutions
• Strategic planning and roadmapping to address IT issues and mitigate against system failures
• Data monitoring and reporting to protect against malware, phishing and cyber attacks
• Business continuity and planning for ongoing protection of data and valuable company assets
• Cyber security strategy consulting to detect and respond to cyber threats

Why Internal IT and Outside Partners Should Blend

With the rise of cloud computing, keeping all your IT in-house is less and less likely to be the best option for your organization: You don’t want to risk falling behind. On the other side of this coin, completely outsourcing the management and execution of your IT to an external company – while often a really smart move – isn’t for everyone.

More and more organizations are opting for a blend of in-house and external IT professional services to outsource specific IT functions, while maintaining responsibility for the rest. Forbes reports that using a mix of in-house and outsourced approaches is a great way to make a well-balanced model, ensuring you have the right people doing the right things — right when you need them.

Along with the flexibility and scalability that comes from blending IT, companies benefit from achieving short- and long-term goals with actionable roadmapping, increased productivity and efficiency through digital transformation and updated systems and technology solutions.

Transform Your Business With IT Professional Services

Collaborative technology consulting gives you clarity to go further faster. At Afidence, we’re vendor-agnostic, so our toolkit overflows with options. Our proven syncMETHODOLOGY™ is a process that ensures communication, transparency and success from discovery to implementation and beyond.

We understand you want to use technology to its greatest advantage. You and your team deserve a partner who listens to understand and then identifies and implements solutions. If you need help improving the technology needs of your business, call us today. Businesses searching for higher performance trust Afidence to deliver.