These are the most important things you must think of when it comes to updating your IT park.
Extend contracts and simplify work
The older your IT park gets, the more difficult it will be to maintain it. Regarding workstations, for example, a quite common deal is to have them on rental, with a three-year contract. After the contract expires, one often can purchase the equipment, or update the contracts with new solutions. Most often, it is more profitable to update the contracts, since you then can ensure that your computers and software are updated.
If your IT park is as little as five or six years old, you will need to make a quite big investment just to make sure everything works properly. Therefore, keeping the same workstations for three years is a reasonable time to maintain the same standard that your co-workers and your customers are used to. With an updated IT park, your employees will have fresh workstations, and most importantly – they won’t have to handle old systems, which could both take a lot of time and might have a negative impact on their motivation.
Keep solutions up to date and have suitable support
The most important thing you have to think of when updating your IT park is how you are able to support it. Since large companies manage hundreds of workstations where a lot of things can go wrong, there is always a need for both the solutions and the IT-department to be up to date. Having suitable support for your business is also necessary in managing daily issues.
Be aware of your issues
To acquire the most suitable support routines for your business, you must keep track of all the issues with your solutions. Consider, for example, the number of breakdowns and how these have affected the rest of your business during that time. To avoid having your employees spend more time waiting rather than doing their actual work, make sure you collect data regarding the errors of your IT park. This way, you will know exactly how much and what kind of support you need. The best support solutions for your company of course also depends on what kind of software you are using, and can be influenced of trends that might affect your business.
Make sure the inner level is updated first
Also, bear in mind that your IT park must be updated regularly to prevent it from becoming old-fashioned and may negatively affect the business development. With a lot of legacy in the business the infrastructure might not be adapted for new technology, and this is crucial when you need to update your IT-investments. Make sure you implement new activities on the inner level before updating the outer IT solutions that will interact with your customers. Otherwise, you might end up in a situation where you launch a new fancy mobile app for your customers, but that investment will be useless if you don’t have reliable internet connectivity or the proper wireless infrastructure. If you don’t keep your eye on the inner level, your employees might not understand and you will have difficulty implement something new and innovative.
