When you buy into any idea, you need to ask yourself, “how much money am I willing to spend?” The same goes for your business’ IT. Of course, your business isn’t a public television telethon, but today, we’re going to pretend it is by going through the levels of investment you can make and how it can impact your business.
Minimal Level
Obviously, you can choose to invest minimally or not at all. A lot of businesses choose to avoid technology upgrades as much as possible because they don’t find them to have any major positive effects on their business. Today, technology is an extremely important part of the customer experience, so some investment is going to be necessary, but you can bare bones it pretty well if you find minimal technology and instituting break/fix strategies are worth it for your business.
Base Level
The base level IT investment is basically spending enough every year to ensure that your business can use the technology you have effectively and that you have a minimum amount of technology in place to ensure that you deal with technology-related problems enough to keep things on the up and up. Many times, businesses that don’t have the capital to invest in a lot of technology-related upgrades find themselves investing enough in their IT by choosing services over purchasing IT outright. This means subscribing to managed IT services in lieu of hiring in-house IT administrators and choosing cloud computing over hardware that has to be constantly monitored and maintained.
Moderate Level
The moderate level of IT investment is where you will find a lot of technology-centric companies. They may not be overhauling their IT and implementing a quarterly IT project, but they do house their own hardware and keep it managed and maintained well. Typically, companies that adhere to a moderate IT investment schedule complete regular refreshes and keep their IT up and running effectively with comprehensive redundancy and have a plan for their IT should there be problems with it.
Superior Level
A company that makes IT a priority tends to have significant capital to spend with a very specific plan of how that money will be spent. These companies have teams of IT administrators working diligently on implementing new projects, training their staff, and keeping their employees working on up-to-date technology. Companies that invest a lot of capital in their technology don’t just throw money at it and hope it sticks, but can get through a failed implementation and still commit to trying again without taking too big of a hit to the bottom line.
What kind of business are you? At Grove Networks, we can help any business stretch their technology investments from consultation and planning, to managing and maintaining crucial systems, and helping to cut down on the costs of your new IT projects. Give us a call today at (305) 448-6126 for more information.
