Cloud solutions are one way of helping SME IT demands
Gartner’s predictions that IT spending at SMEs will grow faster in the next five years than the overall market is going to open up options for Cloud solutions.
According to the latest report from the leading market research company, SME IT spending will grow an average of 3.8%, exceeding the 2.8% average growth for the overall IT market. IT services and software will account for nearly 50% of the global SME spending increase during that time.
This rapid rise is equally putting a lot of strain on mid-market IT groups who have historically relied on email, spreadsheets and home-grown solutions to manage all of their work.
While the issues faced by SMEs are not on the same scale as the Fortune 500 companies, they can take advantage of the valuable lessons learnt by those larger enterprises who have been transforming their IT operations for years.
With the continued expansion of Cloud-based offerings, taking the leap into IT Service Management is now within the grasp of most smaller companies
Luckily, SMEs are no strangers to Cloud-computing for automating business tasks, many of them already drive more than half of all global Cloud consumption according to TMC in an article published in 2014. These companies are already recognising the benefits of using more agile, lower cost, Cloud applications.
Here are three steps that SME IT leaders and teams can take to help grow their business more effectively using Cloud-based service management.
- Ditch the email and spreadsheets and automate your workflow
Personal productivity tools shouldn’t be used to run an IT department. Without visibility into IT requests and incidents, teams can struggle to prioritise and assign work to the right expert, resolve bottlenecks or provide timely responses to employees.
Getting incident management up and running via a Cloud solution is a big win which can drive up to a 20 per cent improvement in the time it takes to resolve open issues.
- Record your IT assets
Making sure you have a single system of record is critical to understanding what assets your business has, where they are located and who has access to them. Connecting assets to incidents, requests problems, changes etc., makes IT teams’ work much more efficient and informed.
It also gives you better knowledge to be able to advise future IT direction within the company.
- Visibility in the workplace
When you are rolling out an IT Service Management process you have to know what you want to measure. Being able to measure results also allows for visibility in the workplace, for tracking and recording.
Small but powerful IT teams can get off the treadmill of simply trying to “keep up” with the pace of developments by adding in Cloud-based automation.
This will allow you to manage, track and measure tasks quickly and consistently and is the first step on the road to moving away from reactive IT management to proactive.
If you’re looking for ideas and suggestions on how best to manage your IT solutions, here at Technosys we offer a Virtual IT Support package which different levels of service at a cost to suit your business needs.
You can find out more, and sign up for our free monthly ServiceNow support tips here.
